Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU could arrive disappointingly late in 2023

Regarding Nvidia’s RTX 4060, we’ve not heard much on the grapevine about this GPU, but now a detailed rumor has come through for the graphics card – though we’d treat some of this with more skepticism than normal.

As flagged up by @harukaze5719, a regular contributor to hardware leaks on Twitter, this purportedly comes from Lenovo’s Gaming Desktop Product Planning Manager in China, a certain ‘Wolstame’ who shares info on the performance and release date of the RTX 4060 via Weibo. (Hat tip to VideoCardz for spotting this, by the way).

And if you were thinking this more affordable Lovelace GPU was close to hand, then think again – although the lack of speculation thus far around the graphics card kind of tells its own story in that regard.

According to Wolstame, the RTX 4060 will arrive on ‘618’ which refers to June 18, 2023, the date of a major shopping festival over in China.

As to the rumored performance, Wolstame makes it quite clear that they are just guessing, but that we should expect something in the ballpark of the RTX 3070. At the same time, they mention the 4060 being 20% faster than the RTX 3060, which doesn’t equate to a 3070, falling a fair bit short – so this part of the rumor is rather a head-scratcher (apply a ton of extra seasoning, in other words).

Power consumption will supposedly be lower than the RTX 3060 at perhaps as low as 150W.

Price-wise, the RTX 4060 will be around the same asking price as the RTX 3060 Ti, the leaker asserts – at least that’s how we read it (some of the phrasing and translation leaves room for doubt).

If we’re going by recommended pricing, the RTX 3060 Ti is pitched at $399 over in the US for its MSRP (£369 in the UK).

Analysis: Nothing affordable on the horizon for Lovelace, then?

The most interesting part of this rumor is that release date, and presumably June 2023 would be the launch target not just for the Chinese market, but elsewhere globally.

That’s still seven months away, so will be a disappointing blow to those folks who might have been hoping for an RTX 4060 sooner rather than later. For now – if this rumor is right – it looks like we’re going to be stuck with the top-end RTX 4080 and 4090, and then perhaps an RTX 4070 Ti (which is said to be the previously ‘unlaunched’ RTX 4080 12GB, of course).

Price-wise, we’re not banking on the RTX 4070 Ti being all that reasonably priced, particularly not when you look at the price tags pinned on the RTX 4080 models. So affordable Lovelace GPUs do not appear to be remotely on the horizon, in short – the only hope is that we do get a vanilla RTX 4070 before too long, and this is pitched in a more reasonable vein price-wise. For the moment, though, Nvidia appears to be firmly pursuing a ‘layered’ strategy we heard talk of a while back, where folks looking for a cheaper graphics card are simply being pushed to buy an RTX 3000 model (as there’s still an excess of stock with these).

Indeed, this is what Wolstame suggests – the leaker seems pretty down on the prospects for the RTX 4060, so rather than wait a long time for the GPU to turn up, Wolstame advises buying an Ampere model (RTX 3080, in fact – though the RTX 3070 is supposedly the performance equivalent of the RTX 4060).

Speaking of that purported performance, it is couched in terms of an absolute guess – and confusingly put across, as Wolstame appears to be making two different guesses, in fact, – so overall, we think it’s likely way too early doors to be drawing even any vague conclusions about the power of the RTX 4060.

That said, it is worth noting that the RTX 4060 is going to get the benefit of DLSS 3, so for some games, that will really up its performance levels compared to RTX 3000 models. (Possibly Wolstame is talking rasterized performance, too, although that isn’t made clear – so ray tracing gains could be more substantial for the RTX 4060 as well).

For now, then, let’s treat this rumor dump with the caution it really deserves, but we can’t say we’re surprised to hear that the RTX 4060 could still be a long way off – although admittedly, we weren’t thinking quite as far away as next June. Time will tell.