NVIDIA Confirms $299 GeForce RTX 4060 Will Arrive Early, What To Expect
NVIDIA is gearing up to release its most affordable Ada Lovelace GPU to date a little earlier than expected. Right now that distinction belongs to the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, which technically starts at $399 (there's at least one SKU on sale for $379). However, it will soon pass the baton for the least expensive GeForce RTX 40 series card to the regular GeForce RTX 4060 (read: non-Ti model) starting at $299.
Originally slated to release in July when it was announced last month, NVIDIA has confirmed on Twitter and its website that the GeForce RTX 4060 will be available to order starting on Thursday, June 29 at precisely 6:00am PT (9:00am ET). That's two weeks from today.
As we've pointed out in the past, PC gamers flock in larger numbers to more affordable GPUs. That's not to say there's no market for high-end, top-tier graphics cards like the GeForce RTX 4090 or Radeon RX 7900 XTX. There certainly is, but as Steam's hardware survey consistently shows, it's the mainstream SKUs that are most prominent.
According to the latest survey results, more than 1 in 10 Steam gamers are getting by with a GeForce GTX 1650 or GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card that are both now several generations old. After those two GPUs, the GeForce RTX 3060 is the most popular, followed by the mobile variant and then the GeForce RTX 2060, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, in that order.
The GeForce RTX 4060 ranks as the only sub-$300 modern generation graphics card from AMD and NVIDIA, the other being the former's Radeon RX 7600. If you throw Intel into the mix (and you should), there's also the Arc A750 and, depending on sale prices, sometimes the Arc A770.
As for specs, the GeForce RTX 4060 is based on NVIDIA's AD106 GPU with 3,840 CUDA cores, 128 TMUs, 48 ROPs, 120 Tensor cores, 30 RT cores, and 8GB of GDDR6 memory tied to a 128-bit bus for 288GB/s of memory bandwidth.
NVIDIA has been criticized for skimping on VRAM, which is something AMD has pounced on in various marketing campaigns. However, this is less of a potential point of contention on a more affordable GPU that will squarely target 1080p gaming. Note that AMD's Radeon RX 7600 also has 8GB of VRAM, but one advantage of the GeForce RTX 4060 is access to NVIDIA's DLSS 3 technology, which is exclusive to Ada Lovelace.
We'll see soon enough how it performs, especially now that the GeForce RTX 4060 is confirmed to release a little earlier than originally announced.
