Enlarge / Nvidia’s RTX 4060 lineup. It’s not listed here, but the regular 4060 will be launching at $299. (credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia is beginning to roll out its new Ada Lovelace GPU architecture to sub-$500 graphics cards, the models that the vast majority of PC gamers buy and use. There’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti will launch on May 24 for $399, the same price that the RTX 3060 Ti launched for in December 2020—it’s the first GPU launch in ages not to come with a price hike built in. Like other RTX 4000-series GPUs, it supports DLSS 3’s AI-assisted frame rate-boosting technologies and AV1 video encoding support, and it’s much more power-efficient than its predecessors. The bad news is that the 4060 Ti is an unusually mild upgrade over the 3060 Ti, with the same 8GB bank of RAM and (according to Nvidia) just 15 percent faster performance than the 3060 Ti in games without the DLSS Frame Generation feature enabled.

• 

  When DLSS FG is out of the picture, the 4060 Ti is about 15 percent faster than a 3060 Ti. Obviously comparisons against older cards will be even better, and most people choose not to upgrade their GPU every single generation. [credit:
  Nvidia ]

Nvidia will sell a Founders Edition version of the 4060 Ti that looks about the same size as its Founders Edition RTX 4070; it also uses Nvidia’s 12VHPWR connector, though cards from Nvidia’s partners will often opt to use a traditional 8-pin power connector instead.