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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 AD106

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 AD106: Comprehensive Review of the Graphics Card for Gamers and Professionals

April 2025

Introduction

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 AD106 is a graphics card that continues the tradition of the “budget flagship” in the RTX 40 series lineup. It combines modern technologies, energy efficiency, and an affordable price, remaining relevant even two years after its release. In this article, we will explore what makes this model notable, how it performs in games and professional tasks, and who should consider purchasing it in 2025.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Ada Lovelace Architecture

The RTX 4060 is built on the Ada Lovelace architecture, utilizing TSMC's 5nm process technology. This has allowed for a 30% increase in transistor density compared to the previous Ampere generation, which positively affects performance and energy efficiency.

RTX and DLSS 3.5

The card's main advantages include support for third-generation ray tracing and DLSS 3.5. The DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology uses neural networks to increase FPS without sacrificing image quality. Version 3.5 features improved image reconstruction and reduced motion artifacts, which is especially beneficial in games that heavily utilize RTX, such as Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty or Alan Wake 2.

Reflex and Broadcast

Additional features include NVIDIA Reflex (reducing latency in esports games) and Broadcast (AI for streaming). However, support for AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) remains at the compatibility level through drivers, with DLSS being the "native" upscaler for the RTX 4060.

2. Memory: Type, Size, and Speed

GDDR6 and 12 GB — The Optimal Choice?

The RTX 4060 is equipped with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus. The bandwidth reaches 384 GB/s (memory clock is 16 Gbps). This is sufficient for most games at 1440p resolution, but limitations may arise at 4K, especially in projects with ultra textures, such as Horizon Forbidden West.

Why Not GDDR6X?

The use of GDDR6 instead of GDDR6X is attributed to NVIDIA's desire to reduce costs and heat. However, by 2025, 12 GB no longer seems excessive; for example, in Starfield with high-resolution mods, the graphics card loads 10-11 GB of VRAM.

3. Gaming Performance: FPS, Resolutions, and RTX

1080p: Maximum Comfort

At Full HD, the RTX 4060 demonstrates stable 90-120 FPS in AAA games without ray tracing (Elden Ring, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare IV). With RTX and DLSS 3.5 enabled, performance remains around 60-80 FPS (Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition).

1440p: Sweet Spot

At Quad HD, the card handles most projects at high settings (70-90 FPS), but for stable gameplay with ray tracing, DLSS needs to be activated. For instance, in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora with Medium RTX and Quality DLSS, the average FPS is 55-60.

4K: Only for Less Demanding Projects

At 4K, the RTX 4060 is suitable for esports titles (Valorant, CS2) or older AAA titles (Red Dead Redemption 2). However, for newer releases like GTA VI, settings will need to be reduced to Medium, and DLSS Performance should be used.

4. Professional Tasks: Editing, Rendering, and Computations

Video Editing and 3D Rendering

Thanks to 3072 CUDA cores and NVENC support, the RTX 4060 accelerates rendering in DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro. For example, exporting a 4K video to H.265 is 25% faster compared to the RTX 3060. In Blender, rendering cycles with OptiX are completed 30% faster than on the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT.

Scientific Calculations

For machine learning and computations, the card supports CUDA and OpenCL. However, its 12 GB of memory limit work with large neural network models — for this purpose, it is better to consider the RTX 4070 or professional solutions.

5. Power Consumption and Cooling

TDP 160 W: Savings on Power Supply

The RTX 4060 has a TDP of 160 W, which is 20% less than that of the RTX 3060 Ti. This allows for a power supply of 500 W (550 W recommended for headroom).

Cooling Systems

The reference models from NVIDIA are equipped with a dual-fan cooler, but partner versions (ASUS Dual, MSI Ventus) offer triple-fan solutions. For cases with poor ventilation, it’s advisable to choose a model with a heatsink that extends beyond the PCB (for example, Gigabyte Windforce).

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT

The main competitor is the Radeon RX 7600 XT (16 GB GDDR6, $349). In games without ray tracing, AMD gains 5-10% due to FSR 3.0 optimization, but in RTX scenarios, the RTX 4060 leads by 15-20%.

Intel Arc A770

The Intel Arc A770 (16 GB, $299) catches up with NVIDIA in DirectX 12 but suffers from driver issues in older projects. It is not the best choice for multi-platform studios.

Within the Brand: RTX 4060 vs RTX 4060 Ti

The RTX 4060 Ti (14 GB GDDR6X, $399) is 25% faster at 4K, but the difference at 1440p is nearly imperceptible. If the budget is limited, the base 4060 is optimal.

7. Practical Tips

Power Supply and Compatibility

- Minimum PSU: 550 W with an 8-pin cable.

- Compatibility: PCIe 4.0 x8 (don’t forget to update the motherboard BIOS for older chipsets).

Drivers and Optimization

- Always use NVIDIA Game Ready Driver.

- For streaming, enable NVENC in OBS — this will reduce CPU load.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Excellent performance at 1080p/1440p.

- Support for DLSS 3.5 and ray tracing.

- Low power consumption.

- Price: starting from $299 (new models).

Cons:

- 12 GB VRAM may be insufficient for 4K in 2025.

- The absence of GDDR6X limits bandwidth.

9. Final Verdict

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 AD106 is an ideal choice for:

- Gamers looking to play at Full HD/Quad HD with maximum settings.

- Streamers who value latency reduction technologies and high-quality upscaling.

- Amateur editors working with 4K video and 3D graphics.

If you seek a balance between price, performance, and energy efficiency — this card remains one of the best offers on the market in 2025.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

January 2023

Model Name

GeForce RTX 4060 AD106

Generation

GeForce 40

Base Clock

1830MHz

Boost Clock

2535MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 4.0 x8

Transistors

22,900 million

RT Cores

Tensor Cores

Tensor Cores are specialized processing units designed specifically for deep learning, providing higher training and inference performance compared to FP32 training. They enable rapid computations in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, text-to-speech conversion, and personalized recommendations. The two most notable applications of Tensor Cores are DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and AI Denoiser for noise reduction.

120

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

120

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

5 nm

Architecture

Ada Lovelace

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

8GB

Memory Type

GDDR6

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

128bit

Memory Clock

2250MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

288.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

121.7 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

304.2 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

19.47 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

304.2 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

19.859 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

3840

L1 Cache

128 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

24MB

TDP

200W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 Ultimate (12_2)

CUDA

8.9

Power Connectors

1x 12-pin

Shader Model

6.7

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

550W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

19.859 TFLOPS

3DMark Time Spy

Score

10621

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GA102

22.185 +11.7%

Radeon RX 7600 XT

20.992 +5.7%

GeForce RTX 4060 AD106

19.859

GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Mobile

19.084 -3.9%

RTX A4000 Mobile

17.544 -11.7%

3DMark Time Spy

GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER AD102

24279 +128.6%

RTX A5000

14182 +33.5%

GeForce RTX 4060 AD106

10621

GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile

8534 -19.6%

GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB

6327 -40.4%