So, with the release of the Nvidia RTX 4070, all eyes have truly been on the highly anticipated release of the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti, but if a recent report is rolling out then lower your hopes. This pitch could suck.
At least that's the word of Red Gaming Tech (opens in a new tab), whose sources price the RTX 4060 Ti at $450, which is $50 more than the RTX 3060 Ti it replaces. That's an almost 13% gen-over-gen increase, and while it doesn't seem like that significant of a price increase, it really is, and the RTX 3060 Ti was already more expensive than it should be when it launched.
The RTX 4060 Ti's performance target seems to be on par with the RTX 3070, albeit DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, and you can expect better performance while gaming than the RTX 3070, when these features are turned on. with your games. This is not always the case, of course.
And with prices everywhere rising, it should come as no surprise that Nvidia is, too. There's just one problem: no one has the money, and putting GPUs out of reach for gamers who have missed out on an entire generation of GPUs to cryptominers and speculation bots is a great way to sour loyal customers.
Now, to be clear, this is a rumor, so everything should be taken with a grain of salt until we hear something more official from Nvidia. And, many of Nvidia's Lovelace series price "leaks" have been wrong, so we can't just give up in utter exasperation. Still, if Nvidia continues this trend and starts charging more for these lower-tier cards, gamers are in for a rude awakening.
Nvidia will burn a lot of its fans if it overprices its budget cards
Not a single Lovelace card has sold for the price of its predecessor, and as our friends at PC Gamer (opens in a new tab) point out, that's increasingly unjustifiable as you go down the GPU stack.
The Nvidia RTX 4090 played tricks on the RTX 3090 Ti and just put up dumb numbers compared to the rest of the Ampere generation. Considering the RTX 3090 had an MSRP of $1,499 and the RTX 4090 bumped it up by $100, that was a much more acceptable compromise. A price increase of around 7% for a card that offers 50-60% better performance in 4K? It seemed pretty reasonable, at least when compared to the price of the 3090 and 3090 Ti.
Then came the RTX 4080, which was priced to match the RTX 3080 Ti and dropped the conversation entirely based on that. The RTX 4070 Ti was better, but not by much, and the RTX 4070 is really on the edge of what a lot of gamers are willing to put up with right now.
And just as the RTX 4070 offered the performance of the RTX 3080 (and even the performance of the RTX 3080 Ti) at €599 (a 20% price increase over the RTX 3070), at this point we should honestly expect to see Nvidia. setting the price of the RTX. 4060 Ti more than good to go along with what should be similarly upgraded performance.
But what does all this matter even if players can't afford to buy the cards you're trying to sell them? Since it's still pretty easy to find the RTX 4070 in stock in the US and UK, it doesn't seem like many gamers are jumping at the chance to pick up the 4070 at its MSRP. Many of them probably can't afford to spend $600 on a GPU, and are probably waiting for the RTX 4060 Ti to finally make the leap.
So Nvidia could be in real trouble if it hits those gamers with a price hike that puts our successor pick for the best next-gen graphics card out of their reach when for many it's the card most of them have. waiting status.
It's literally the sort of thing that could turn longtime Team Green fans into AMD enthusiasts, especially since AMD has yet to announce its Radeon RX 7800 XT, let alone its lowest-in-the-stack cards. And if those cards are as good as the ones we saw with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, Nvidia could be fumbling with what is likely to be its biggest graphics card launch of the year.
Honestly Nvidia, for this card at least keep the MSRP where it was last time, the extra $50 per card just isn't worth it.