Review and Testing of the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC Graphics Card
Today we have at our disposal a noteworthy video card from the world famous manufacturer ASUS - the magnificent GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC model. We will evaluate its capabilities in detail and determine its place in the market of modern graphic solutions.
Based on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, the GeForce RTX 4060 family of graphics cards brings DLSS 3 technology to the masses. According to the latest Steam poll, four of the top five most popular graphics adapters belong to the 60 series. The RTX 4060 Ti is perfect for delivering impressive visuals, high FPS, and smooth 1080p gameplay for games like Microsoft Flight Simulator and Cyberpunk 2077.
For creatives, the GeForce RTX 4060 family is equipped with fourth generation Tensor Cores for AI-centric content creation, third generation RT cores, and DLSS 3 compatibility for ultra-fast 3D rendering. There is also an eighth generation NVIDIA encoder (NVENC), now with AV1 support.
The GeForce RTX 4060, based on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, brings DLSS 3 to the $299 price segment. This makes it a great choice for those who play at 1080p and want to upgrade their GeForce GTX 1060 or RTX 2060 to something really fancy to get their PC ready for games like Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, F1 23", "Alan Wake II", "Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart" and many more!
For content creators and streamers, the RTX 4060 features the eighth generation NVIDIA encoder (NVENC) and AV1 support, ideal for YouTube streaming.
| APPEARANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS |
This subsection of our review reveals the main aspects of the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC, such as appearance and hardware configuration.
| APPEARANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS |
The ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC graphics card comes in a compact but no less attractive box. The box is designed with amazing elegance, which is almost equal to the large and luxurious packages from other manufacturers.
The black background of the inner box contrasts artfully with the graphic of the graphics card, creating an aesthetic impression and giving us the promise of a high quality product.
Opening the box, we find inside only the video card itself - without any additional accessories. It may sound strange, but this minimalism highlights ASUS' core concern - providing the customer with a great product that can speak for itself.
One of the most notable design elements of the graphics card is the special cutout on the rear panel. This cutout is designed to increase the airflow through the heatsink, which improves cooling efficiency and, as a result, increases the performance of the device.
Additionally, there is a BIOS switch on the rear panel that makes it easier for the user to change the graphics card settings.
Despite its impressive capabilities, ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC takes up only two PCI-E slots, providing efficient cooling and maximum performance in your system.
On the side of the device is an 8-pin power connector, which is an interesting departure from the standard 12-pin. This suggests that this graphics card model consumes less power, making it more versatile and compatible with a wide range of systems.
The video card is equipped with four video outputs: one HDMI and three DisplayPort. While these outputs support resolutions up to 8K, keep in mind that this is only possible for video. For games, given the class of the video card, it is recommended to stick to Full HD resolution.
| ARCHITECTURE |
The GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card is based on the AD107 GPU and is equipped with 3072 CUDA cores, which provide 15 TFLOPS of power for rendering traditional bitmap graphics. It also has 96 Gen 4 Tensor Cores delivering 242 FP8 Tensor-TFLOPS (decimated) for AI and DLSS processing, and 24 Gen 4 Ada RT Cores capable of delivering 35 RT-TFLOPS to support next-generation ray-traced graphics. In addition, the card contains 8GB of GDDR6 memory and 24MB of L2 cache.
Like all GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, the RTX 4060 is packed with Ada innovations, including Shader Execution Reordering (SER), new RT core engines, and DLSS 3, while delivering the most efficient combination of performance and power efficiency.
The RTX 4060 is a great platform for gamers and content creators alike, delivering immersive graphics, AI performance acceleration, live streaming with NVIDIA Encoder, NVIDIA Reflex, and more.
NVIDIA Ada Streaming Multiprocessor
The RTX GPU has three core processors: a programmable shader that was introduced almost 20 years ago, RT cores for accelerating ray and triangle intersections, and an artificial intelligence processing pipeline called Tensor Cores.
The Ada architecture improves on all three RTX processors:
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Programmable Shader: 29 Shader-TFLOPS, compared to 22 TFLOPS on the RTX 3070 Ti. SM Ada includes a new Shader Execution Reordering (SER) technology that redistributes tasks on the fly, doubling the speed of ray tracing shaders. SER is as significant an innovation for GPUs as out-of-order execution has become for CPUs.
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Gen 4 Tensor Cores: The new Tensor Cores in Ada include the NVIDIA Hopper FP8 Transformer engine, which delivers over 466 sparse tensor terraflops in the RTX 4070 for AI workloads. That's double the 174 tensor teraflops on the RTX 3070 Ti. Compared to FP16, FP8 reduces storage requirements and doubles AI performance.
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Gen 3 RT Cores: New Opacity Micromap Engine speeds up alpha-tested geometry ray tracing by a factor of 2, and new Micro-Mesh Engine allows additional geometry to be created on the fly, allowing for increased geometry complexity without the cost of building and storing BVHs . Ray and triangle intersection performance on Ada reaches 67 RT-TFLOPS, compared to 42 RT-TFLOPS on the RTX 3070 Ti.
4th Generation Tensor Cores
Tensor cores are high-performance computing cores specialized in matrix multiplications and accumulations that are used in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing applications. Tensor cores provide breakthrough performance for matrix calculations, which are critical for training and inferring deep learning neural networks. Sample output applications include NVIDIA DLSS 2.1 technology for gamers, which introduced a new 9x upscaling mode with 1440p internal rendering and upscaling to 8K resolution. In addition, many creative applications have begun to use artificial intelligence features to speed up the work of artists. NVIDIA Broadcast also offers noise removal tools,
Fourth-generation tensor cores of the Ada architecture build on the capabilities of previous Ampere GPUs, which supported many new data types and introduced sparsity that doubled the throughput of tensor cores compared to Turing tensor cores. Ada's fourth-generation tensor cores support the new FP8 data format, which was first introduced in the NVIDIA Hopper GPU architecture. Compared to FP16, FP8 data format reduces data storage requirements and doubles AI performance. With the new FP8 format and sparsity feature, the GeForce RTX 4070 delivers 466 teraflops of performance for AI inference tasks.
3rd Generation RT Cores
The third generation of RT cores in the Ada architecture are specialized hardware blocks to speed up BVH traversal and perform ray and triangle intersection calculations, which is critical for speeding up ray tracing.
RT cores free up the resources of the programmable SM shader cores, allowing them to perform other pixel, vertex, and compute tasks. Ada RT cores provide ray and triangle intersection test acceleration up to 2x faster than Ampere architecture GPUs, allowing developers to add more detail to their virtual worlds. The Ada architecture also features the Opacity Micromap Engine, which accelerates alpha-tested geometry ray tracing by a factor of 2, and the Micro-Mesh Engine, which generates micromeshing on the fly to generate additional geometry, allowing for more geometric complexity without the expense of creating and storing BVHs.
AV1 video encoding
The GeForce RTX 4070 offers hardware support for video encoding using the AV1 codec. AV1 provides improved image quality at the same bit rates as H.265/H.264, which is a big advantage for game streaming. With AV1, users can achieve the same image quality at lower bit rates, resulting in smaller file sizes and faster video loading. AV1 Ada encoder is 40% more efficient than H.264 encoder in Ampere architecture.
So, thanks to the improved technologies and architecture of Ada, the GeForce RTX 4060 is an excellent choice for content creation professionals and gamers who demand high performance and visual quality. With support for the latest technologies such as ray tracing, DLSS and AV1, the RTX 4070 graphics card delivers superior image quality and performance for today's and tomorrow's games and applications.
| GPU Tweak III OPERATING MODES |
The GPU Tweak UI has been updated to be more user-friendly and intuitive. Now the key functions of the program are brought to the fore, making them easily accessible to users. VF Tuner has also been improved, which simplifies the process of manually overclocking a video card.
In addition to the list of exclusive features such as 0dB fan technology, GPU Tweak has been updated with new features including automatic profile switching and monitoring logging. This gives ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC users even more control over how their graphics card works.
In standard mode, the card's operating frequency is 2505 MHz at 100% power limit, while the frequency in games reaches 2680 MHz.
In the automatic overclocking mode, the frequency of the card rises to 2535 MHz, and the power limit - up to 110%.
And in silence mode, the processor frequency is reduced to 2475 MHz, and the power limit is set at 90%.
Thus, ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC is not only a high-performance device for gamers and graphics professionals, but also a platform that provides users with a powerful and flexible tool to manage and optimize their graphics card. This helps users achieve maximum performance and best image quality in all usage scenarios.
| HEATING AND POWER CONSUMPTION |
The ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC power efficiency test was conducted with an Intel Core i9 13900K processor running at 3.2 GHz and an Asus ROG MAXIMUS Z790 APEX motherboard, all housed in a sealed DeepCool CH510 WH case.
ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC demonstrated excellent thermal efficiency and low power consumption during FurMark testing. Reaching temperatures as low as 58 degrees under full load, this graphics card delivers reliable and stable performance even in the most demanding games and applications.
Power consumption of 112 watts indicates that the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC graphics card is focused on energy efficiency, which makes it attractive to users who value both performance and energy efficiency. Such power consumption also reduces the load on the computer's power supply and contributes to the overall extension of its life.
The test results confirm that the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC is an excellent choice for those looking for a high-performance and energy-efficient mid-range graphics card.
| TEST PART |
| test configuration | |
| test stands |
Asus ROG MAXIMUS Z790 APEX 32 GB DDR5 7200@7800 CL30 KingstonFURY Renegade Kingston FURY Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD Housing DeepCool CH510 WH |
| multimedia equipment |
Power Supply Seasonic PRIME TX-1000 |
| software configuration |
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| operating system | Windows 10 21H2/ Windows 11(Alder Lake) |
| graphics driver |
Nvidia GeForce/ION Driver Release 536.20 WHQL |
| monitoring programs |
MSI Afterburner |
| GAMES |
All games were taken at the discretion of the editors, from the position for which it would now be possible to buy this new product. We also tested how the novelty behaves in 4K resolution with an external monitor. We have not taken synthetics seriously for a long time, we are only interested in games:
| Resident Evil 4 |
Testing took place at maximum quality settings (with ray tracing).
In this game, the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC beats the GEFORCE RTX 3060 12 GB with 71 FPS versus the latter's 61 FPS. However, as in previous cases, it is inferior to more powerful models.
| A Plague Tale: Requiem |
Testing took place at maximum quality settings (with ray tracing).
ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC outperforms its predecessor GEFORCE RTX 3060 12 GB with 34 FPS versus 30 FPS respectively. However, it is still inferior to more powerful models such as GEFORCE RTX 3060 Ti and GEFORCE RTX 4060 Ti.
| Aliens Dark Descent |
Testing was carried out at maximum quality settings.
In this game, ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC shows FPS 94, which is 17.5% more than GEFORCE RTX 3060 12 GB. But its performance is still lower than GEFORCE RTX 3060 Ti and GEFORCE RTX 4060 Ti.
| Amnesia The Bunker |
Testing was carried out at maximum quality settings.
Here ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC shows FPS 157, which is 8.3% more than GEFORCE RTX 3060 12 GB. However, it is inferior to GEFORCE RTX 3060 Ti and GEFORCE RTX 4060 Ti.
| Hogwarts Legacy |
Testing took place at maximum quality settings (with ray tracing).
ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC is comparable in performance to GEFORCE RTX 3060 12 GB, both showing FPS 39. However, as in previous cases, it is inferior to GEFORCE RTX 3060 Ti and GEFORCE RTX 4060 Ti.
| The Lord of the Rings Gollum |
Testing took place at maximum quality settings with RT.
In this game, ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC is comparable in performance to GEFORCE RTX 3060 12 GB, both showing FPS 33. However, as in previous cases, it is inferior to more powerful models.
| The Last of Us Part I v. 1.1.0.0 |
Testing was carried out at maximum quality settings.
In this game, the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC beats the GEFORCE RTX 3060 12 GB with 74 FPS versus the latter's 63 FPS. However, as in previous cases, it is inferior to more powerful models.
| DLSS 3.0 |
Testing took place in games at maximum quality settings with RT.
Enabling DLSS 3.0 technology on the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC graphics card can give a significant boost to gaming performance, with minimal trade-offs in visual quality.
| CONCLUSION |
ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC is a worthy representative of a new generation of graphics cards. Inheriting all the advantages of the Ada Lovelace architecture, this model makes a significant contribution to the development of gaming and professional environments.
The graphics card allows you to easily cope with modern games and resource-intensive tasks. While 8 GB of video memory may not be enough for some, it's important to note that memory efficiency also matters a lot.
The ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC will be a significant upgrade for anyone looking for a graphics card for today's games. It not only introduces innovative technologies such as DLSS 3.0 and Ray-Tracing, but also improves energy efficiency and thermal performance.
Definitely, the predecessor of the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC, the GEFORCE RTX 3060 12 GB graphics card, boasts a large amount of video memory, which makes it especially attractive for those who play memory-intensive games or use ray tracing. However, despite these advantages, the GEFORCE RTX 3060 12 GB lags behind the RTX 4060 DUAL OC in terms of overall performance and support for the latest technologies such as DLSS 3.0.
In conclusion, the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 DUAL OC stands as an excellent graphics card for those looking for the best price/performance ratio. If your applications and games can really use more than 8 GB of VRAM, the GEFORCE RTX 3060 12 GB remains a worthy choice, but in terms of overall performance and future readiness, the RTX 4060 DUAL OC looks more attractive.
