At the MSI: Insider Livestream weekly, they talk about the latest upcoming tech released by MSI or in partnership with MSI. They perform live benchmarking and performance testing of the hardware, showing a raw and unfiltered view of the products.
This week, at the MSI Insider Weekly, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB graphics card was tested in a Live Benchmarking event where it was shown that it is slower than the 8 GB RTX 4060 Ti. The performance difference is about 0.5% between the 16GB and the 8GB model across six different titles, including Cyberpunk 2077.
Despite MSI being a board partner and manufacturer, it had no idea of the RTX 4060Ti 16GB benchmark details ahead of the live stream.
Neither Nvidia nor its board partners had provided the test units to reviewers and the media. This led to a lack of official coverage upon the card’s release on 19th July 2023.
However, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB delivered marginally lower performance than the 8GB RTX 4060 Ti. It must be remembered that both these cards had a similar TGP with 165W for the 16 GB variant and 160W for the 8 GB variant.
The RTX 4060Ti 16GB specifications are identical to the 8GB variant. Both are built atop the AD106 GPU based on the Ada Lovelace architecture.
— VideoCardz.com (@VideoCardz) July 20, 2023
In the tests, the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X Slim 16GB variant performed worse than the 8 GB variant marginally in Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra preset with Ray Tracing enabled, F1 2023 on Ultra Preset with Ray Tracing enabled, Rainbow 6: Siege on Ultra Preset and Fortnite on Epic Preset with Ray Tracing Enabled.
It had comparable performance to the 8GB variant in Hogwarts Legacy on Ultra Preset with DLSS3 and Frame Generation enabled. It only performed better than the 8GB variant in CS: GO on the auto graphics preset.
While the exact reason for lower performance on a graphics card with higher GDDR6 VRAM is unknown, some speculations exist. Techpowerup suggests that the lower performance could be attributed to the 16GB VRAM “imposing slightly higher latency” or having a higher power draw despite having 225W.
This report by MSI will make it even harder for board partners to sell the RTX 4060 Ti with 16GB VRAM at USD 100 or 25% higher MSRP than the 8GB model.
Nvidia enthusiasts are also disappointed that the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB variant, despite charging 25% more, still has only 17 Texture Processor Clusters unlocked on the AD106 instead of the available 18.
It was also expected that since the AD106 GPU also supports GDDR6X VRAM type, Nvidia would upscale the memory speed to 21 Gbps.
With AMD and Intel fighting to bring out competitive GPUs in today’s GPU market, Nvidia is making things harder for themselves with product offerings and pricing that barely make sense. The RTX 4060Ti 16 GB sales will be worth keeping an eye on.
About Nvidia
NVIDIA Corporation is an American multinational technology company incorporated in Delaware, based in Santa Clara, California. They design graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets, as well as system on chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market.
Best known for the “GeForce” lines of GPUs, they are a direct competitor to AMD’s “Radeon” series. NVIDIA has also expanded its offerings with its handheld game consoles Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, and Shield Android TV and its cloud gaming service GeForce Now.
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