Review and Testing of the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL OC Graphics Card

 

In this test, we are honored to test a video card from ASUS - the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL OC model. It is based on the cutting-edge NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture, which provides decent graphics quality and high performance.

APPEARANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS

This subsection of our review reveals the main aspects of the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL OC, such as appearance and hardware configuration.

APPEARANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS

 

The compact packaging of the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL OC graphics card offers a sleek and sophisticated design that rivals the aesthetics of larger counterparts. This is complemented by the careful placement of the components inside, which highlights the attention to detail and high quality of the product.

 

ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL OC comes without additional accessories, including only the graphics card.

 

One of the interesting design elements is a specific cutout on the back of the video card. It provides increased airflow through the heatsink, which increases cooling efficiency and improves device performance.

 

The graphics card occupies two PCI-E slots in the PC case, providing efficient cooling and maximizing system performance.

 

On the side of the device is an 8-pin power connector instead of the usual 12-pin, which indicates reduced power consumption. It also makes the product more versatile and compatible with different systems, which is a valuable attribute for users.

The ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL OC graphics card is equipped with four video outputs: one HDMI and three DisplayPort. All of these outputs support 8K resolution, which sets the device apart from others in its class.

ARCHITECTURE

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB graphics card entered the market on May 18, 2023. Manufactured in 5nm and based on the AD106 GPU in the AD106-350-A1 variant, this graphics card supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, ensuring compatibility with all modern games. In addition, support for DirectX 12 Ultimate brings ray tracing, variable shading and more to future video games.

The AD106 GPU is a mid-sized chip with a die area of ​​190 mm² and 22.900 million transistors. It includes 4352 shading units, 136 texturing units and 48 ROPs. It also includes 136 tensor cores that increase the speed of machine learning applications. The graphics card is also equipped with 34 cores to accelerate ray tracing.

NVIDIA bundled the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB graphics card with 8 GB GDDR6 memory connected via a 128-bit memory interface. The GPU runs at 2310 MHz, which can be boosted up to 2535 MHz, while the memory runs at 2250 MHz (18 Gb/s effective).

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 4070 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 interface has been updated for ease of use, highlighting key features, while VF Tuner has been redesigned to make manual overclocking easier. In addition, automatic profile switching and monitoring logging have been added to the list of exclusive features such as 0 dB fan technology.

As a result, owners of the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL OC graphics card have at their disposal a powerful tool for tuning and controlling the operation of their graphics card, allowing them to optimize its performance to the maximum and achieve the best image quality.

 

In standard mode, the card's operating frequency is 2565 MHz at 100% power limit, while the frequency in games reaches 2750 MHz.

 

In the automatic overclocking mode, the frequency of the card rises to 2950 MHz, and the power limit - up to 110%.

 

And in silence mode, the processor frequency is reduced to 2535 MHz, and the power limit is set at 90%.

HEATING AND POWER CONSUMPTION

The ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 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.

According to the results of testing in the FurMark program, the video card reaches a temperature of 63 degrees, while its power consumption is 160 watts.

These results demonstrate that the ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Ti DUAL OC has excellent thermal efficiency and moderate power consumption considering its power. The temperature level of 63 degrees at full load is a completely normal indicator for modern video cards of this class, which confirms the efficiency of the cooling system of this model.

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	Monitor Philips 326M6VJRMB/00 Power Supply Seasonic PRIME TX-1000
Software configuration
operating system	Windows 10 21H2/ Windows 11(Alder Lake)
Graphics driver	Nvidia GeForce/ION Driver Release 536.23 WHQL
Monitoring programs	MSI Afterburner