Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB seemingly underperforms against its 8GB variant

It may not be worth the additional cost

Recently, it was believed that Nvidia would be launching a 16GB version of its RTX 4060 Ti. The consensus was not great; even board partners didn’t appear too enthusiastic about Team Green’s latest Ada Lovelace offering. Much of that comes down to the price. However, it now looks as though things may be worse than first appeared.

According to a report from TechPowerUp, the 16GB variant of the Nvidia graphics card is worse than its 8GB predecessor. This is in spite of the fact that the former has double the VRAM (though everything else is identical), but a test performed by MSI shows the newer model underperforms.

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— 188号 (@momomo_us) July 19, 2023

Admittedly, it’s not by a huge margin. A now-deleted video (that, in itself, is interesting) benchmarked the 16GB version against the 8GB, showing that framerates in games like Cyberpunk 2077, F1 2023, and Rainbow Six: Siege were lagging slightly behind the latter model. Twitter user @monomo_us was able to screengrab one part of the test, which shows the results.

Why is the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB performing less?

It may not seem like much to see the framerate for Cyberpunk drop from 91.4 on the 4060 Ti 8GB to around 90.56 on average for the 16GB version, but it’s worth remembering that this is supposed to be a better graphics card. With twice the memory, it should, in an ideal world, be outperforming its 8GB sibling.

According to PC Gamer, there may be a couple of reasons for this. It could be memory latency in the newer Nvidia card. It could be something to do with Windows, but it’s not clear what exactly. It could also be the additional wattage on the 16GB model. At 165W (compared to 160W), it could be experiencing “power limitations under demanding circumstances.”

In any case, it doesn’t look great for Nvidia. It’s already been established that hardly anyone is using the RTX 4000 series at the moment, most likely because of the price. In short: this generation of GPU tech doesn’t seem to be going well for Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang and co.