Nvidia is set to release the $499 RTX 4060 Ti 16GB on July 18. This GPU addresses one of the two major criticisms of the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, namely its lack of VRAM, but does nothing to address widespread criticism of its price. In fact it does the opposite, making the already expensive $399 RTX 4060 Ti 8GB look like a bargain in comparison.
The information comes from MEGAsizeGPU who just recently revealed the launch date of the RTX 4060. The leak references what appears to be an internal Nvidia document, though the date or time of the review embargo was not revealed.
As the old saying goes, there are no bad graphics cards, only bad prices. (It is too a saying, trust us.) The RTX 4060 Ti 8GB just isn't a good card at $399, especially when it doesn't significantly outpace the RTX 3060 Ti or AMD's RX 6700 XT. It's already been confirmed that the 16GB card is otherwise identical to the 8GB version, and 8GB more is not worth the extra $100.
If the Ti was called the RTX 4060 (and the RTX 4060 was the RTX 4050) and priced $100 lower we'd be saying something entirely different. Nvidia has scored an own goal this generation.
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest
But that's not the only interesting RTX 4060 Ti news. According to Andreas Schilling of Hardwareluxx, AIB partners are less than enthusiastic about the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. They know the card is poor value for money. I spoke to an AIB representative at Computex who was also very much ambivalent towards the 16GB card.
Nvidia is reportedly not releasing a Founders Edition RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. That leaves more of the promotional heavy lifting to be done by AIB partners.
It will be interesting to see how both 4060 Ti models fare in the months ahead. They definitely will have a long life, given the RTX 50-series is perhaps two years away, if not longer for an RTX 5060.
Pricing aside, it's great to have 16GB of VRAM on a card that mainstream gamers will use for many years to come. It adds that little bit of future-proofing by ensuring that any games released in the next few years will avoid memory capacity limitations, even if the rendering performance or memory bus of the AD106 GPU runs out of steam before then.
A single RTX 4060 Ti model with 12GB and a 192-bit bus at $349-$399 would have been better received. But money does strange things to people, and corporations. The mining boom is over, but the desire for profit remains.
