It has been a nervous few weeks in budget conscious studios and agency lofts across the country as we await the launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and RTX 4050 GPUs.
Thankfully, we’re almost there and at G2 we’re already preparing our order books to meet what is sure to be a high demand for the products.
While not being the most powerful graphics cards of their generation, their quality and competitive price will make them a popular choice among deadline-burdened audio-visual and computer engineers, as well as architects and graphic artists.
Industry chatter suggests the RTX 4060 – expected to retail at between £330 and £410 – will be released sometime in April, although a specific date has not been mentioned. So far, there is no mention of when the 4050 might hit the shelves.
In terms of value for money, both ranges provide a high level of quality and performance at a modest cost.
In the meantime, we may well see the RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070 hit the market – the word is production has already started – with both cards using the same GPU as the RTX 4070 Ti.
The RTX 4060 Ti will use the AD106 chip, being the first-ever desktop GPU to do so.
Keynote announcement
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was expected to announce the launch of the RTX 4060 Ti in a
keynote on Nvidia’s upcoming AI products on March 2, but that turned out to be a false flag.
At G2 we’re keeping across all sources of information and will update our customers when there is more news.
According to the latest ECC listing, the company could release its entire RTX 40 series stack in under a year, quick even by Nvidia’s standards. At G2 we’re excited about being able to offer our customers such an expanded range in relatively short order.
GPU manufacturers use ECC listings to register model names with relevant governments and they are generally an accurate guide to models that are currently in the development stage.
While the 4060 won’t offer generation high specs, its price/performance ratio will make it a popular choice among budget conscious builders.
The estimated specs of the 4070 suggest the CUDA core count will be the same as the previous generation RTX 3070, while also including a memory bus reduction from a 256-bit wide to 192-bit.
The 4060 Ti has fewer CUDA cores than its 3060 Ti predecessor and a bus width limited to 128-bits wide. However, the 4060 Ti is said to have a 160W TDP, so it will be very power efficient.
It is rumoured the 4060 could consume more power than the RTX 3070, so anyone planning to upgrade a low-spec rig may have to switch out their PSU.
This suggests Nvidia is focusing more on saving power than anything else for its mid-range cards, leaving the Ada Lovelace architecture and its higher clock speeds as the only method to increase GPU performance.
Both the 4060 and the 4050 should follow similar trends but these are judgements, at present, and it is still uncertain whether Ada Lovelace will scale at lower core counts and power limitations.
Worthy successor
Meanwhile, if speculation is to be believed, the 4050 could be a worthy successor to the GTX 750 Ti, with excellent performance under a 75W envelope.
It is built on the 4nm process and based on the AD106 graphics processor – an average sized chip with a die area of 190 mm².
Unlike the fully unlocked 4060 Ti, which uses the same GPU but has all 4352 shaders enabled, Nvidia has disabled some shading units on the 4050 to reach the product’s target shader count. It features 2560 shading units, 80 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs.
Also included are 120 tensor cores which help improve the speed of machine learning applications.
The card also has 18 raytracing acceleration cores. NVIDIA has paired 8 GB GDDR6 memory with the 4050, which are connected using a 128-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 2505 MHz, which can be boosted up to 2640 MHz, memory is running at 2250 MHz (18 Gbps effective).
Being a dual-slot card, the 4050 draws power from 1x 12-pin power connector, with power draw rated at 150 W maximum. Display outputs include: 1x HDMI 2.1, 3x DisplayPort 1.4a. The 4050 is connected to the rest of the system using a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 interface.
Rackmount PC Specialists
G2 Digital specialise in rack mounted systems. Providing compact well-built systems featuring high end GPUs.
Our experts can work directly with you to design and build a bespoke or tailored solution. Contact our team on +44(0) 333 880 4242 or drop us an email.
