Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is reportedly just days away from launch, but rumor has it that there may not be a lot of GPUs to choose from. This isn’t a sign of another dreadful GPU shortage, though. It’s more that the RTX 4060 Ti has very little chance to rank high among the best graphics cards you can buy.
We’ve just recently seen the release of the RTX 4060, but Nvidia still has another card up its sleeve — a clone of the existing RTX 4060 Ti that comes equipped with twice the VRAM. However, due to certain factors, the GPU might be doomed to a life of subpar sales and unsatisfying benchmark results.
The speculation around support comes from HardwareLuxx’s Andreas Schilling, who recently tweeted about the card. The editor claims to have spoken to some of Nvidia’s add-in board (AIB) partners about the upcoming RTX 4060 Ti and found that very few of them were interested in launching the GPU.
Talked to some AIB partners: It looks like very few are interested in promoting the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB in a big way. You can already see that in how many fewer models there are compared to the standard variant. Its getting to close to the GeForce RTX 4070.
— Andreas Schilling 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@aschilling) July 6, 2023
In other words, it seems that Nvidia’s board partners don’t have much faith in the success of the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, which is why the number of non-Founders Edition models might be limited. This sounds grim, but there’s a reason why manufacturers doubt Nvidia’s latest graphics card.
Most prospective buyers weren’t pleased to hear that Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti would come out with only 8GB of VRAM across a 128-bit memory bus. As we’ve found, that’s just not enough to run many modern games well at maxed-out settings. Nvidia’s 16GB 4060 Ti might put a bandaid on the problem, but with the same narrow 128-bit bus, it could still have problems.
The main issue for the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, though, is that it’s $500, which is only $100 less than the RTX 4070. That GPU is somewhere around 30% faster than the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, and although the 16GB may close the gap a bit, it’s unlikely to get close to the $600 card. Even with a bump to 16GB, the RTX 4060 Ti has the same number of cores and is otherwise identical to the 8GB variant.
Simply put, the RTX 4060 Ti may not offer enough of a boost to justify the price tag. Placed smack-dab in the middle of two other GPUs, it’s hard to justify picking up. Gamers on a budget could choose the RTX 4060 for their next PC build, and those who can spare the money might as well just go for the RTX 4070 instead. This could be why Nvidia’s AIBs might feel a little apprehensive about this model.
That puts the $500 RTX 4060 Ti in an awkward position from the get-go, and it seems that Nvidia’s AIBs may not be willing to take the plunge and release the GPU in massive quantities. In a way, that should come as no surprise — not only is the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti expensive for the specs, but it’s also following in the footsteps of two other 4060 cards that have already been getting price cuts.
In a way, if the demand for some of Nvidia’s latest graphics cards is unsatisfactory, that might mean good things for the next generation. Perhaps Nvidia will adopt a better price-to-performance ratio in its next-gen RTX 5000 graphics cards. For now, we’re stuck with what we have, which is the RTX 4060 Ti with 16GB VRAM, reportedly set to release on July 18.
