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Oct 06, 2023

Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti

A really great card, but more powerful than you need for most tasks You know

A really great card, but more powerful than you need for most tasks

You know you’ve truly made it when Nvidia send you a free graphics card for you to review! Well, perhaps not quite, but it's kind of fun. My views of course remain my own. I happen to own the RTX 4080 (which I’ve reviewed here), but I was happy to run the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti through the same paces.

There are three new cards from Nvidia and unlike the higher end cards, there are plenty of third party cards from the likes of Asus and Gigabyte at MRSP:

Let me give you a TL:DR summary of the RTX 4060 Ti (8GB) version I am reviewing here. This is a great upgrade for you if:

Swapping the 4060 Ti in for my 4080, the first thing I noticed was that the 4060 Ti is much smaller. This is quite welcome, as I can barely shut the case with the 4080 in it. Plus the power usage/cost is much lower too and it means you don't need as powerful a PSU.

You can read all about the specs if you want, like the increased L2 cache or the reduced memory bus (compared to the 3060 Ti), but the only thing I’m interested in is how it performs in day to day editing tasks.

I used the 4060 Ti for a week of editing in Adobe Premiere Pro. I noticed no difference whatsoever in downgrading from the much more expensive 4080. This is to be expected – these cards are much more powerful than NLEs need in the day to day. In the last few years I’ve used the 2060 Super, the 4060 Ti and the 4080 – all of them gave me the same experience in day to day editing.

The RTX 4060 Ti is more than powerful enough for most editors. As you can see below, unless doing more intensive tasks, it has most of the performance of the much more expensive 4080. It's a great card, though if your budget is smaller, you could also consider waiting for the 4060 at $100 less or getting a used 20 or 30 series card – I don't recommend going back further than that because there was a significant increase in H.264 encoding quality that came at the 20 series & since then I’ve never bothered with software compression. And I do recommend sticking with Nvidia, they just work that bit better than AMD for editing tasks.

These tests are slightly different from my last review and the software versions and drivers have advanced, so I tested all three cards again. This test is decoding H.264 (8bit 4:2:0) at 1080p to DNx (could also be ProRes) – which you would do when transcoding or making proxies at the start of a project.

This is the opposite test – encoding H.265 from a mezzanine codec. For example you have exported a ProRes master and need to send it for review. This test is at UHD and makes use of what I learned about presets to get the most speed.

For interest I did an H.265 export test for Resolve at 1080p which doesn't access the dual encoders of the 4080. It still beats the 4060 Ti, but by a lot less. The 2060 Super falls further behind though.

This test is for when you have H.264 media on your timeline and export to the same for review. Again I did this one at 1080p so all the figures are higher than last time, though Resolve pulls ahead remarkablty at this resolution.

Strangely, with the latest version of Topaz, the card didn't make any difference at all, though it was much faster across the board since my last test. Realistically this will probably change again with future versions and I expect if you do use Topaz a lot, a 4080 or 4090 will be great to have.

This is the kind of work where it really pays to have a 4080 or 4090 – things like noise reduction in Resolve or even more an AI based tool like the remarkable Magic Mask.

A good rule of thumb for VRAM is: Resolution +2 is safe, Resolution x2 is better. So for 1080p/2K you are fine with 4GB VRAM. With UHD/4K, 6GB VRAM is usually fine and 8GB is better. If you do use 6K or 8K you might want to wait for and pay the extra $100 for the 4060 Ti (16GB) version that's coming out in July.

Graphics cards get more and more powerful each year and while the gaming community seem to complain for each and every release, I think for the post production professional, you get a lot of value out of cards such as the 4060 Ti.

However, if you’re a colourist or do graphically intensive tasks or are a Davinci Resolve power user, you can get quite a bit more out of the more expensive cards and probably want more than the 8GB VRAM on offer here.

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