NVIDIA's current lineup of GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards are expensive, with the RTX 4070 costing $600 on its own, and other models selling for well over $1,000. NVIDIA has now revealed a long-awaited budget option: the RTX 4060 family.

The GeForce RTX 4060 and 4060 TI are new graphics cards intended to replace the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti, respectively. They're powered by the same Ada Lovelace architecture as the other 40-series cards, with fourth-generation Tensor Cores for AI workloads, third-generation RT cores, and support for DLSS 3.

NVIDIA is targeting the cards towards content creation, with optimizations for 3D, video, and AI workflows. NVIDIA says the cards are up to 45% faster than the previous generation in 3D model editing, and rendering times across tools like Adobe Premiere Pro and DaBinci Resolve are faster. There's also full support for AV1 decoding and encoding, thanks to NVIDIA's eigth-gen NVENC software. A blog post explains, "The new encoder is 40% more efficient, making livestreams appear as if there were a 40% increase in bitrate --- a big boost in image quality that enables 4K streaming on apps like OBS Studio and platforms such as YouTube and Discord."

The RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti should be excellent cards for games as well, though the cards are still mostly aimed at 1080p gaming. Even though they have NVIDIA's latest desktop graphics architecture, both GPUs have 8GB of VRAM, while many newer games demand more than that. NVIDIA is planning to release a version of the 4060 Ti with 16GB VRAM, but that will cost more money.

You'll be able to buy an RTX 4060 Ti 8GB starting on May 24, at a price of $399. The 16GB version will be available later in July for $399, and the regular RTX 4060 will arrive in July for $299. That's an impressive price point for the 4060, at $30 less than the original MSRP for the 3060, but we'll have to see how performance holds up in real-world tests.

Source: NVIDIA, The Verge