Nvidia now selling the RTX 4060 on power efficiency, says it's 8 times faster than GTX 1060

Nvidia announced its RTX 4060 series cards, the RTX 4060 Ti and the RTX 4060, last month. The 4060 Ti launched for $399 and has been very poorly received by most of the press due to the little or no performance uplift that it offers, compared to the 3060 Ti.

On average, the 4060 Ti is about 10% faster than its predecessor, and at times it is even slower. This falls quite a bit short of Nvidia's own claim of the card being 15% faster.

To make matters worse, the 4060 Ti comes with only 8GB VRAM despite costing $400, and its 16GB variant is a whole $100 extra, which is kind of ridiculous as GDDR6 memory is not really all that expensive nowadays.

Seeing the poor reception of the GPU, AMD too was forced to cut the price of its own RX 7600 just a few days before the launch. As such, the 7600 has received a bit more praise than the 4060 Ti. And now, Nvidia too is reacting to the negativity.

The company has published a blog post today sharing more details on the upcoming RTX 4060. This GPU was initially planned for a July release but Nvidia has decided to launch it early on June 29.

The Green team has realized that performance-per-dollar (value) and VRAM capacity are not some of the metrics with which it can entice buyers. Hence, Nvidia is now focusing on the power efficiency of the RTX 4060, something which it knows is excellent on these cards. In its blog post, it says:

At recent energy prices, the average gamer playing 10-20 hours a week could save a significant amount, while having a vastly superior gaming experience. In Germany, for example, a gamer playing 20 hours a week could save up to $132 in energy costs over the course of 4 years, when upgrading from an RTX 3060 to an RTX 4060.

Nvidia has focused on the UK and US as well, alongside Germany. The energy prices in the European countries are indeed pretty high and Nvidia's reasoning here makes sense.

Alongside the talk about power efficiency and energy savings, the firm has also shared (below) a new slide where it compares the RTX 4060 vs the RTX 3060, the 2060, and the GTX 1060.

According to these figures, the 4060 can deliver eight times (8x) the performance of the GTX 1060 Pascal GPU, which is quite a hefty claim. There is also a strange demarcation on the graph which suggests Nvidia may somehow be tying ray tracing performance in this.

While Nvidia may not be technically wrong here, it is also probably not an apples-to-apples comparison here as the GTX 1060 does not have ray tracing (RT) cores. Moving on to the newer RTX 2060, Nvidia states the 4060 is 2.3x or 130% better.

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