Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Review

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 arrives in the middle of an industry-wide identity crisis for the best graphics cards. Because while affordable GPUs like the Nvidia RTX 2060 remain by far the most popular cards if you look at the Steam Hardware Survey, both Nvidia and AMD have only been paying lip service to this huge swath of PC gamers. You just need to look at the 4060 Ti and its silly $399 price tag to see what I’m talking about.

Thankfully, Nvidia didn’t raise the price of the RTX 4060 compared to its generational predecessors, keeping it at the same $299 price point as the RTX 3060 and RTX 2060. For anyone upgrading from the RTX 2060, the RTX 4060 does actually deliver a sizable increase in performance, but the limited 8GB of VRAM might hold it back, especially as games get bigger and more memory-hungry.

DLSS 3.0: Is It Worth It?

If you already have a powerful graphics card like the RTX 3060 or an AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, the RTX 4060 probably isn’t for you. In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t have access to an RTX 3060 to do direct testing against, as I left all the RTX 3000 cards I reviewed at TechRadar there. However, I do have an RTX 3060 Ti, and while that card is a significant step up from the regular RTX 3060, it’s not so much more powerful that it doesn’t provide meaningful data.

And, the RTX 4060 is straight up not as fast as the RTX 3060 Ti in most games. The only times it really pulls ahead is when I enable DLSS 3.0 Frame Generation – a feature the RTX 3060 Ti just doesn’t support. Frame Generation is a new technology built into Nvidia RTX 40-series graphics cards and can increase framerates in supported games by tracking movement and generating extra frames without having to wait for the CPU. In fact, Frame Generation does away with the typical render queue every PC game used in the past.

You see, before this technology, your CPU would send your graphics card several frames worth of information so that the graphics card would stay busy, which meant the frame you’re seeing at any given moment is actually 2-3 frames behind your actions in game. That’s not a huge deal, especially at high frame rates, as your GPU is spitting out 60+ frames every second anyway.

It becomes an issue in games that require a lot of CPU performance, however. Graphics cards these days are much faster than processors, so open world games in particular end up with stuttering and performance drops as the GPU is left waiting for the CPU to do its thing. Frame Generation does away with this aging approach to video game rendering.

Instead, while the GPU is waiting for the CPU, it renders new frames independently of the CPU by using AI to predict where each pixel would be in the next frame. Theoretically, it should mean your graphics card will be running at full blast all the time, which means more frames per second. Nvidia counters the added latency this would bring to the table by making its Reflex technology mandatory to enable Frame Generation. Reflex basically cuts out the middle-man from every button press and mouse click to reduce latency. Latency and responsiveness end up being about the same as with a traditional render queue, just with a higher frame rate.

This new technology is really the selling point of the RTX 4060 over the RTX 3060 if you’re upgrading from an older card. You can absolutely get similar performance out of the RTX 3060, but you wouldn’t be getting DLSS 3.0. Right now, that’s not especially worth it if you can find an RTX 3060 for cheaper, which you can at the time of writing, but if you have to choose between the two at the same price, the RTX 4060 is worth picking just to have access to another feature.

Asus Dual RTX 4060 – Design and Specs

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 is based on the same Ada Lovelace graphics architecture as the rest of the RTX 40-series lineup. That means you get the same third-generation ray tracing cores and fourth-generation Tensor Cores as the RTX 4090, just a lot fewer of them. Specifically, the RTX 4060 has 24 Streaming Multiprocessors, so you get 96 Tensor Cores and 24 RT Cores. You also get 3,072 CUDA cores, down from 3,584 in the RTX 3060.

The RTX 4060 is also equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which is less than the RTX 3060 launched with back in 2021. Nvidia makes up for this a little bit with more cache, up to a whopping 24MB, which means less data will have to get stored in VRAM in the first place. Only time will tell, but in my initial testing, this graphics card still ran into VRAM constraints.

The light specs do allow the RTX 4060 to run with very little power, peaking at just 117W in my testing. Even with this basic AIC model, that’s relatively easy to cool, and I didn’t see temperatures peak above 76°C – and that was with little to no noise coming from the fans.

This is going to vary wildly with the RTX 4060, though. Nvidia did not produce an in-house Founders Edition for the RTX 4060, which means you can only get it through third-party manufacturers like Asus, Zotac, and Gigabyte. The version reviewed here is an Asus Dual RTX 4060, which comes in at the $299 MSRP. However, there will be more expensive models out there, some likely hitting upwards of $350. In general, however, if you’re spending that much money on a graphics card, you should just save up a bit more and go for the $399 RTX 4060 Ti instead.

The Asus Dual RTX 4060 is a relatively basic aftermarket card, though it does look quite snazzy. It’s an all-black shroud, sporting a metal backplate and two fans. The biggest win here has nothing to do with cooling though – it’s the power connector. Instead of the annoying 24-pin connector that requires most folks to use an adapter, this Asus RTX 4060 instead uses a single 8-pin power connector. Honestly, it’s a breath of fresh air.

Nvidia RTX 4060 – Performance

The Nvidia RTX 4060 is billed as a 1080p graphics card and at that resolution, it’s incredibly impressive – except for when it’s not. In most games, this graphics card is easily able to average 60+ fps at 1080p with all the eye candy turned on. But there are some games where it does struggle.

In Far Cry 6, for instance, while the average frame rate is a pristine 102 fps, near the end of the benchmark where it zooms out and has more things happening, the 8GB of RAM causes the GPU to choke, resulting in drops down to 40 or 50 fps. This isn’t an issue that’s going to come up in most games at 1080p, but it’s something to consider, especially if you want to play new PC games as they come out over the next couple of years.

There are games where RTX 4060 performance blows me away, however. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the hardest games to run these days, and at 1080p at the “RT Ultra” preset and DLSS on Quality mode, the RTX 4060 gets a solid 62 fps. Turn on Frame Generation and that number goes up to 96 fps, making it a genuine treat to play. To put that in perspective, the Radeon RX 7600, AMD’s competitor, only manages 33 fps at the same settings, but with FSR enabled instead of DLSS.

The performance gap between the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600 narrows when there’s no ray tracing happening, though. In Total War: Warhammer 3, the RTX 4060 gets 84 fps at 1080p max settings, with the Radeon RX 7600 keeping up at 83 fps. Which of these graphics cards is right for you is ultimately going to depend on what games you’re looking to play, and whether or not you care about ray tracing and DLSS 3.0.