The inevitable Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti GPU specs have been posted by one of the more reliable "leakers" on the Internet. And I don't think they make for pretty reading.

According to Kopite7kimi (opens in new tab), the key number is 4,352 shaders, known in Nvidia terms as a CUDA core. According to this metric, the new RTX 4060 Ti will have fewer CUDA cores than the old RTX 3060 Ti (opens in new tab), which was rocking 4,864 pixel pretty stuff.

Of course, shader count is not everything. Clock speeds count for a lot, as does the increase in L2 cache in the Ada generation. The chip will likely be a bit below 3 GHz, which at the rumored 32 MB L2 level would be a 300% upgrade over the RTX 3060 Ti. Similarly, shader hardware is not directly comparable between GPU generations.

At the same time, however, the RTX 4090 (open in new tab) has 16,384 shaders, while the RTX 3090 (open in new tab) has 10,496. Even the much maligned RTX 4080 (open in new tab) has increased its shader count to 9,728 over the RTX 3080's 8,704.

In other words, if you thought the RTX 4080 was a disappointment, you haven't seen anything yet. It is worth remembering that the new RTX 4060 Ti is likely to still be faster than the RTX 3060 Ti, thanks in part to Nvidia achieving faster frequencies in the 4nm Ada Lovelace generation of RTX 40 series GPUs.

Therefore, a performance increase of around 20% is expected between generations. Also, whatever the RTX 4080 is, the price will likely increase by more than 20%. If so, the RTX 4060 Ti will have fewer frames per dollar than the RTX 3060 Ti. That would be sad indeed.

Of course, these are just rumored specs. Nothing official. But given how Nvidia has structured the new RTX 40 series so far, I fear that the profit and value proposition will deteriorate as we move down the product stack.

One hope here is that reports of slow sales of the RTX 4080 might make Nvidia reconsider raising the price of its new GPUs into the stratosphere; the RTX 3060 Ti has an MSRP of $399, but the crypto frenzy and pandemic have made the number has become somewhat academic; expect the RTX 3060 Ti's MSRP to remain the same, but the actual retail price to be at a similar level to this one.