Friday, March 29

What is the memory controversy of Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti? | Digital Trends Spanish


The rumors are true: nvidia has two versions of its new RTX 4060 Ti graphics card. These are the highly anticipated new mid-range GPUs, and yes, one comes with 8GB of VRAM and the other comes with 16GB, and they’re $100 apart in price.

It’s a head-scratching decision on a few different levels. Games that demand more than 8GB of VRAM are becoming more common, which is frustrating for those looking for the $399 8GB model. Also, the RTX 4070 Ti comes with just 12GB of VRAM, despite costing $599.

That puts Nvidia in a strange place when trying to sell the RTX 4060 Ti, but the company has an answer. A company representative explained their approach to their memory subsystems. All of these changes were made as part of the Ada Lovelace architecture on the rest of the RTX 40 series cards.

But as Nvidia points out, these become increasingly important with these less powerful GPUs in the lineup.

RTX 4060Ti RTX 4070 RTX 4070Ti RTX 3060Ti
Shaders 22 TFLOP 29 TFLOPs 40 TFLOPs 16 TFLOPs
VRAM 8GB / 16GB 12GB 12GB 8GB
L2 cache 32MB288GB/s 36MB504GB/s 48MB504GB/s 4MB448GB/s
memory type GDDR6 GDDR6X GDDR6X GDDR6
memory bus 128 bit 192 bit 192 bit 256 bit
TGP 160W/165W 200w 285w 200w
Price $399/$499 $599 $799 $399

The main change is the size of the L2 cache, which jumps from 4MB on the RTX 3060 Ti to 32MB on the RTX 4060 Ti. This on-chip cache is very important and has an important relationship to the frame buffer, or VRAM.

In theory, the larger cache size allows for less need to constantly search VRAM for data. Nvidia provided the following graphic to explain how relying on the faster and more abundant L2 cache creates less traffic across the memory bus and ultimately less system memory.

This is also an explanation why memory bandwidth is only 288 GB/s (gigabytes per second). Notably, this is much slower than the 448 GB/s on the RTX 3060 Ti or other 30-series cards. But Nvidia has an answer there, too. Because the larger L2 cache cuts memory traffic in half, that doubles the effectiveness of that bandwidth. Nvidia’s math adds up to the equivalent of 554GB/s “effective memory bandwidth” on the RTX 4060 Ti.

Nvidia is also making a big point due to the significant drop in bandwidth from the RTX 4070 to the 4060 Ti: 504 GB/s down to 288 GB/s. So Nvidia’s defense makes sense compared to the RTX 3060 Ti, but how this will fit into the lineup (or against Nvidia’s rivals) is a little less clear.

We’ve seen that Nvidia GPUs tend to use less VRAM than the AMD equivalent in our tests, though as Nvidia freely admits, it’s hard to gauge that difference apple-to-apple. Nvidia claims that the result, however, is better performance. More specifically, Nvidia says the larger cache helps with ray tracing and DLSS performance, two technologies the company continues to tout.

Without ray tracing turned on, the RTX 4060 Ti claims to be 18% faster than the last-gen 3060 Ti. But with ray tracing, it’s increased by 25%.

Another major reason Nvidia is calling attention to this innovation in Ada is to explain why a setup of the RTX 4060 Ti comes with only 8GB of VRAM. That’s especially important since the 8GB model is the one Nvidia is putting its weight behind. It will launch first and is the only model to get a Founder’s Edition release from Nvidia.

More than that, Nvidia’s competitors continue to release 16GB graphics cards even cheaper than the RTX 4060 Ti. For example, Intel’s Arc A770 has 16GB of VRAM and is only $350. It also has a 16MB L2 cache size, which falls between the RTX 3060 Ti and 4060 Ti. We know that the Arc A770 performs much better in games like Hogwarts Legacy than you might assume.

So does the 4060GB RTX 8 Ti have enough VRAM for the price? We’ll have to wait for the reviews to come out to know for sure. Nvidia obviously thinks so. It sounds like there are enough games out there that don’t need that extra memory, or at least that people would be willing to shell out an extra $100 for the 16GB model.

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