Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU benchmarks might seem disappointing at first – but don’t panic

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By Darren Allan
published

Geekbench 6 leak is our first glimpse of how fast the RTX 4060 might be

An Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

Nvidia’s RTX 4060 graphics card is not far off release – indeed, rumor has it that we may see it earlier than expected – so it’s not surprising to see some leaked benchmarks popping up.

These come courtesy of Benchleaks on Twitter (as VideoCardz spotted), and they show the RTX 4060’s performance in Geekbench 6 compute tests.

So, how did the vanilla version of the RTX 4060 do? The GPU managed to attain a score of 105,630 in the OpenCL test, and 99,419 in Vulkan.

VideoCardz had some comparisons on hand to give us some perspective of what those results mean, mainly that the RTX 4060 is around 17-18% faster than its predecessor, the RTX 3060.

Naturally, as with all leaks, we must sprinkle large amounts of skepticism around, and there are other considerations here too, which we’ll discuss in detail below.

Analysis: Disappointing? Not so much as par for the course

The first thing to bear in mind is that while it’s exciting to get a performance leak for an incoming GPU – this is our first glimpse of how the RTX 4060 might perform – it’s only a couple of results from a single benchmarking suite.

Moreover, in terms of judging gaming performance, Geekbench is hardly the first choice of benchmarking product. 3DMark is where we want to head for a synthetic benchmark for a gaming GPU, and besides, even that pales in significance against real-world in-game benchmarks.

What we’re getting at is that you can’t put all that much stock in Geekbench here, but nonetheless, it does represent something of a hint of what we can expect from the RTX 4060.

So, is a just under 20% uplift disappointing? Well, it’s no great shakes, but then again, this is the exact same performance increase that the RTX 3060 offered over the RTX 2060 (going by gaming benchmarks, that is – check out our review of the RTX 3060 here).

In reality, things are looking pretty much in-line with expectations in terms of the generational uplift then, even if that could be disappointing to some gamers (who are often hoping for a bit more than expected, naturally – though you will get that with DLSS 3 in supported games, let’s not forget).

The fact remains, though, that at its MSRP of $299 (around £235 or AU$440) – which is way cheaper than the existing RTX 4060 Ti (and also 10% cheaper than the RTX 3060 debuted at) – the RTX 4060 looks solid enough value. It also compares well to AMD’s RX 7600 results here, being some 30% faster in OpenCL, while only just over 10% more costly (keep the seasoning handy, as ever).

In short, Nvidia could be onto a much better seller than the RTX 4060 Ti. And indeed we’ve long thought that the RTX 4060 Ti floundering in terms of its sales – as has been widely rumored right from the off, and evidenced by the price dropping below MSRP in some cases already – is likely indicative of gamers holding off for the considerably more wallet-friendly RTX 4060.

Time will tell, and we don’t have long to wait for the RTX 4060 to arrive now.

Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).