Around the middle of May, Nvidia unveiled its RTX 4060 series, namely the RTX 4060 Ti and the RTX 4060 GPUs. While the Ti began selling within a week"s time, the non-Ti card was on shelves by the end of June.
The media reception of the 4060 Ti was absolutely awful, and rightfully so, as it was found to be just ~10% faster than the 3060 Ti, and still offering 8GB of VRAM, something which really is unacceptable for a $400 GPU in 2023. And much to Nvidia"s torment, almost no responsible reviewer recommended purchasing this GPU. It was clear that Team Green was greedy here as it wanted to maximize its profit by offering the bare minimum to consumers.
In response to this poor reception, Nvidia changed its marketing tactic with the RTX 4060 non-Ti as it tried convincing buyers of the power efficiency gains, and also made some pretty outrageous claims when comparing with the Pascal-based GTX 1060. Luckily for Nvidia, the RTX 4060 wasn"t as bashed as its Ti sibling since the $300 GPU definitely brings more to the table than the $400 Ti did.
The company is now preparing to launch the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti for an MSRP of $499 and apparently, AIB (add-in-board) partners are really not interested to promote this GPU according to Andreas Schilling of Hardwareluxx:
Talked to some AIB partners: It looks like very few are interested in promoting the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB in a big way. You can already see that in how many fewer models there are compared to the standard variant. Its getting to close to the GeForce RTX 4070.
The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti with 16 GB of graphics memory should only have one purpose: To quiet those critics who find that 8 GB are not enough (I"ll tell you a little secret: that"s right!). But the better equipped model is not very attractive in terms of price and positioning.
While this is unconfirmed news, it makes sense that AIBs aren"t too excited as they realize that the $500 4060 Ti 16GB, which doesn"t offer anything more than the 8GB extra capacity (as memory bandwidth remains the same at 288GB/s), is not going to be much better than the 8GB variant except in a few VRAM-limited titles. And as such, AMD"s last-gen RX 6800 XT 16GB is likely going to be the recommendation from most media outlets. In many ways, it looks like Nvidia is going to outdo itself in just how poor the 4060 Ti 8GB did with the $500 16GB SKU.
Source: Andreas Schilling (Twitter)