Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 vs RTX 3060 review: higher frame-rates, less VRAM

Game benchmarks: Control, Cyberpunk 2077, F1 22, Forza Horizon 5.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on 29 Jun 2023

So far, the RTX 4060 has delivered impressive ray tracing results, with only Control and Hitman 3 hinting that differentials against the RTX 3060 (and by extension, RTX 2060) may be somewhat variable. We've also seen that DLSS remains a potent force in improving performance, but DLSS 3 frame generation doesn't always deliver big frame-rate gains. The truth is that frame-gen has a cost and an already maxed, overwhelmed GPU may have issues where optimised settings may improve matters significantly - something we'll discuss later. Now it's time to move onto rasterisation, where we expect lower gains - and it's where AMD in particular can make an impact, especially as its RX 7600 is significantly cheaper.

Owing to the way users may be jumping around our benchmarking pages, you may be missing out on an explainer of how our benchmarking system presents. Our system offers a number of ways to get to the data you want, the presentation varying according to the device you're using. You'll get a basic overview of our findings on mobile, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is an interactive bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

Control

As the 'corridor of doom' is such a demanding area of Remedy's Control, we've relocated our rasterisation benchmark to the same area because it turns out that it's not the RT element that makes this place so demanding - it's inherent to the corridor whether you're running RT or not.

Control is also a game that seems to cause real issues for the RTX 40-series cards and we see those problems manifest yet again here, where the RTX 4060 is only eight percentage points to the better against its immediate predecessor and where we see an infrequent win for the old RTX 2070 Super, which is seven percent faster. The 4060 still posts wins against RX 7600 and RX 6650 XT, mind you and there's a gigantic performance multiplier vs the old GTX 1060 - though the same can be said for every other card in the line-up here.

Control, High, 4x MSAA

Cyberpunk 2077

This isn't the way we'd be playing Cyberpunk 2077 on this hardware in a world where RT Overdrive is doable at 1080p, but the benchmark does deliver data that shows that rasterisation can cause issues for the RTX 4060, while AMD's RX 7600 is so much faster. There's just a four point lead against RTX 3060, while the 2070 Super is almost 18 percent to the better.

A 16 percentage point lead over the old RTX 2060 is a dire result for the RTX 4060, but at least there's still a game-changing improvement up against the old GTX 1060 in the form of a 2.5x performance multiplier.

Cyberpunk 2077, Ultra, TAA

Forza Horizon 5

There's nothing but unfiltered, raw winning from the RTX 4060 in this test. In contrast to the last two games, the game thrives on the 40-series cards, perhaps best exemplified by a 6.45x performance increase up against a completely overwhelmed GTX 1060. Meanwhile, a 2.1x improvement to frame-rate up against RTX 2060 is a figure that's impressive and something I wish we'd see more of.

We're back to the RTX 4060 beating the RTX 2070 Super, this time with a 17 point lead, while a nigh-on 22 percentage point advantage over the RTX 3060 is also commendable. Extreme mode is heavy on VRAM at higher resolutions (and at 1080p on Intel Arc) but the 4060 still manages to maintain its lead over the 3060 at 1440p too. AMD's RX 7600 can't catch the RTX 4060, but it is proportionately cheaper for the performance you do get.

Forza Horizon 5, Extreme, 4x MSAA

F1 22

Ultra high settings are retained for this benchmark, but the RT features are disabled, delivering some extremely high frame-rates. In fact, when you're talking about frame-rates in the 130fps to 150fps range at 1080p, some might say that percentage differentials are somewhat meaningless as we're talking about millisecond-per-frame variations most people won't be able to tell apart.

Even so, it's clear that tha Intel Arc cards are lacking on this one, while the RX 7600 is able to deliver 1080p performance that's ahead of the RTX 4060 and knocking on the door of the more capable RTX 4060 Ti.