The launch of the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti (opens in new tab) is scheduled for May by rumor mongers, but back in April we started hearing noises about the price of the green team's next most affordable graphics card. The RTX 4060 Ti's price is $450 which is only $50 more than the previous generation RTX 3060 Ti.

Just a little more expensive, but not by much. I guess you have to win where you can, no matter how little it costs.

The rumor comes from a source cultivated by the Red Gaming Tech channel (opens in new tab), allegedly the same source that provided the $599 initial price figure for the recently released RTX 4070 (opens in new tab). And it must be said that this is consistent with what we know about this card.

We expect slightly better performance than the RTX 3070. And given that the RTX 4070 performs about as well as the RTX 3080, which is $100 cheaper, it makes sense for it to be $50 cheaper than the RTX 3070's original price point.

That said, I still don't like it, and given that the actual silicon offered is really shrinking as we go to the lower tiers of the RTX 40 series, it is increasingly difficult to convincingly argue that this card should be priced higher than its direct predecessor. If Nvidia is relying more and more on the (admittedly tangible and seductive) promises of DLSS 3.0 and Frame Generation, it is paying more for software ecosystem improvements than for the hardware itself.

While that may be reasonable given the impressive work spent on Nvidia's upscaling and frame interpolation capabilities, it is hard to shake the feeling that we are paying more for less actual GPU hardware.

The pricing video speaks to the hope (or really, the wish) that the price will tend to drop to the $400 range as the RTX 4060 Ti's release date approaches, but that is probably not likely to happen. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how well the RTX 4070 sells at the $599 price point and whether that will have any impact either way.

We have heard from retailers that it has not sold as well as they had hoped.

Incidentally, the current rumor is that the RTX 4060 Ti will run on the AD106 GPU, the same chip used as the base for the mobile RTX 4070. It will have fewer CUDA cores than the mobile GPU, with 4352 cores instead of the 4608 cores of the laptop chip. The boost clock is leaked by the administrator of the TechPowerUp GPU database (opens in new tab), which states that the default is 2535 MHz.

The real sticking point for the RTX 4060 Ti is the 8GB VRAM limit; like the RTX 4070, the GPU itself has a substantial L2 cache to help keep the bandwidth numbers in check. At least, maybe not when compared to what the card is rumored to carry on its 128-bit memory bus. But that will only help with bandwidth, not the actual capacity to handle the entire game data.

Still, the rumored 288 GB/s memory bandwidth is significantly less than the previous generation RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti.

At 1440p, and even at the top setting of 1080p for some games, this could mean that a $450 GPU would struggle to play games convincingly at the lowest normal game resolution. Therefore, it would be difficult to argue that the RTX 4060 Ti hardware alone is worth $50 more than the RTX 3060 Ti.