The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB has arrived to little fanfare, due in a large part to both Nvidia and its add in board partners (AIBs) deciding not to market the GPU, or send out copies for review. MSI Insider Weekly has now tested the latest GeForce graphics card against the 8GB model, and found the 16GB card is actually slightly slower than its sibling in some circumstancess despite costing $100 more.
Besides their VRAM capacity, both the 16GB and 8GB models have identical specs, including cores, clock speed, and memory bus size, so it stands to reason that there wouldn’t be much difference between the two in benchmarking tests outside particularly VRAM-intensive games. But for the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB card to be slower than its 8GB sibling? That’s surely out of the question, right?
Well, that’s just what MSI Insider Weekly found in its livestream comparing the two pixel pushers. It’s important to state that the difference was within the margin for error, but it’s still there. The 16GB model performed worse than the 8GB one in F1 23, Rainbow Six Siege, and Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra settings, while the two came out about the same in Hogwarts Legacy and Fortnite. A silver lining is that the 16GB version actually came out marginally ahead on CSGO, but that was the only game where it did so.
TechPowerUp suggest a reason for the worse performance could be that, “the higher density 16GB memory is imposing a slightly higher latency, or having a negligibly higher power draw,” and that Nvidia could have made the 16GB variant more appealing by, “enabling all 18 TPCs on the AD106 (the RTX 4060 Ti enables 17); and if the AD106 supports GDDR6X, they should have dialed up memory speed to 21 Gbps.”
At any rate, it looks like the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is very unlikely to end up on our guide to the best graphics card. Check out our Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB review to get an idea of what the 16GB model is capable of, just bear in mind it has double the VRAM at the expense of another $100 added to the price tag.