Fewer shaders than the old RTX 3060 Ti. For real.
Specifications for Nvidia’s inevitable RTX 4060 Ti GPU have been posted by one of the more reliable “leakers” on the internet. And I don’t think they make for pretty reading.
The critical figure according to Kopite7kimi—for it is he!—is 4,352 shaders, otherwise known in Nvidia parlance as CUDA cores. By that metric, the new RTX 4060 Ti will have fewer CUDA cores than the old RTX 3060 Ti, which rocked 4,864 of the pixel prettifying things.
Of course, shader counts are not the be all and end all. Clock speeds count for a lot, as does the Ada generation’s increased L2 cache. This chip is likely to be a shade off 3GHz and at the rumoured 32MB L2 level it would be sporting a 300% upgrade over the RTX 3060 Ti. All that and shader hardware is likewise not directly comparable from one GPU generation to the next, either.
But at the same time, the RTX 4090 has 16,384 shaders to the RTX 3090’s 10,496. And even the much maligned RTX 4080 upped its shader count to 9,728 over the RTX 3080’s 8,704 count.
In other words, if you thought the RTX 4080 was disappointing, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. It’s worth remembering that the new RTX 4060 Ti will likely still be faster than the RTX 3060 Ti, in large part thanks to the speedy frequencies Nvidia is hitting with the 4nm Ada Lovelace generation of GPUs in the RTX 40-series.
So, we’d guess something in the region of 20% performance boost, gen-on-gen. But then we also expect a price boost—and, again, if the RTX 4080 is anything to go by, the price will go up by more than 20%. If so, the RTX 4060 Ti would give you fewer frames per $ than an RTX 3060 Ti. That would be very, very sad indeed.
RTX 4060 Ti has a very short reference board. The PG190 still uses CEM5 connector. AD106-350-A14352FP328G 18Gbps GDDR632M L2220WDecember 13, 2022
Of course, these are merely rumoured specifications. Nothing is official. However, given how Nvidia has so far structured the new RTX 40-series, with the gains and value proposition worsening as you move down through the product stack I have the fear.
Our one hope here is that reports of slow RTX 4080 sales might make Nvidia think twice about pricing the new GPU up in the stratosphere. The RTX 3060 Ti has an MSRP of $399, albeit the crypto madness and pandemic made that number somewhat academic. Dare we hope for the MSRP to stay the same but with real-world prices in something like the same ballpark this time? That’s what it would take to make the RTX 4060 Ti sing, that’s for sure.
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