RTX 3060 vs RTX 4060 vs RX 6700 XT: What's the best $300 GPU?

quick spoiler to grab your attention at the start yes there are situations where the 4060 loses to the 30 60. um it's not the most common result but it does happen in games that are using a lot of vram more benchmarks uh in a second first let's talk about um my what am I reviewing against I'm going to do a series of videos but today's day one video is for a card to launch at 300 and for me to consider it a good uh recommended GPU it would need to beat the card I have already been recommending at the 300 price point for several months now the RX 6700xt at least in the US market has been available for around 300 for quite a while now yes I understand it's MSRP was like 480 or something stupid like that but it's been a very good deal at around 300 for for a while now so the 4060 is going to need to beat that that's what I've been recommending at this price point however the uh 30 60 12 gigabyte we should also compare how does it do against that and also where does this thing cost right now one of the best things about the 4060 is that it actually has a lower MSRP than the 3060. at 300 whereas the 3060 came out at 330 dollars but uh the 3060 um has been available at 280 on the actual market for a pretty much a little over a month now since the 4060 TI announcement pretty much these these kind of dropped in priced around 280 dollars uh now the specific cooler models I'm using by the way I do test everything at their out of the box settings which does include resizable bar and smart Access Memory turned on I always get comments asking that um uh the RX 6700 xtm testing is the reference model which is not the best cooler you can certainly get better results with an OC and all that on uh you know other cards the temps are a little bit High uh the 4060 is the Asus dual this is what I was sent for testing by Nvidia I think that means they probably don't have a Founders edition of the 4060 and then uh the 3060 I have is actually the strix cooler from Asus I'm not doing that to attempt to skew the results that's just honestly I was buying gpus when I started my channel during the whole crypto boom where gpus were being scalped all the time I happened to find an in stock 3060 strix from an actual retailer that was more expensive than it should be but was much lower than scalper pricing so that's why I have the strix cooler uh anyway I think that's what you need to know for us to jump into the uh benchmarks and then I'll give you some final thoughts at the end let's start with some PlayStation 5 exclusives that have been ported to PC some of which have been very memory hungry like for spoken in at its ultra high preset which does include some Ray tracing we can see the 12 gigabyte cards definitely going over eight gigabytes and that's causing problems for the 8 gigabyte 4060 it is basically tied with the RTX 3060 12 gigabyte which does not look good for a generational advancement in the 6700 XT is actually 31 ahead of the 3060 and definitely ahead of the 4060 as well and that is at 1080p Ultra if we go up to 1440p ultra we now see the 30 60 12 gigabyte still basically tied with the 4060 but now it actually is ahead now let me be clear this is not going to be a typical result that we see much of although this is not going to be the only instance that happens in this video where the last generation 3060 product is actually ahead of the RTX 4060 due to having 12 gigabytes instead of eight uh the 6700 XT here is 21 ahead of the 46 60 and this does include Ray tracing in this Benchmark now another PlayStation 5 title that has been very vram hungry on PC is The Last of Us Part One however it has received a lot of patches since the initial initial launch which has improved performance at lower and and lowered vram issues a bit it still wants more than eight at 1080p Ultra although here we do see the 40 60 22 percent ahead of the 3060 and the 6700xt 35 ahead of the 3060 and the one percent lows here look very similar uh the all cards here are actually very playable with the 3060 over 60fps on average and the other two cards even further ahead now if we reduce down to the high preset it's designed to stay better within an 8 gigabyte buffer uh and interestingly here we actually see it's the 6700 XT which seems to take off a little bit relative to the other two um anyway it is what it is so at 1080p High settings the 4060 is 21 ahead of the 30 60 12 gigabytes uh vram capacity does not seem to be an issue here but the 6700 XT is 45 ahead of the 30 60s so the 4060 is kind of falling right in between those two gpus now when we move up to 1440p ultra settings uh the 6700 XT can get us very close to a 60 FPS experience although it is below it at times whereas the 40 60 and 30 60 are basically neck and neck again although there is a small lead in the one percent lows for the 30 60 over its next-gen counterpart of the 4060 now again we're seeing not a good look where the 30 60 and 40 60 are basically tied due to spilling over 8 gigabytes of vram however realistically playing at high settings at 1440p probably does make more sense anyway due to the lower um frame rate if you wanted to hit 60 frames per second you'd probably tweak settings anyway and here we now do see the 40 60 pulling 17 ahead of the 30 60 and 19 in the one percent lows although the 6700 XT is running out ahead of both of them um uh it's 46 ahead of the 30 60 its averages are in the mid 70s and even the one percent lows around 70. there's another PlayStation 5 exclusive that's imported to PC that I test which is returnal at its maximum preset which is the Epic preset it doesn't use any Ray tracing although the game has it it's not part of the maximum preset so I didn't turn it on here and here we're seeing uh this game doesn't use as much vram as um the other two PS5 games we've taken a look at here and the 40 60s 20 ahead of the 30 60 31 ahead and the one percent lows and the 6700 XT is 35 out of the 30 60. so once again the 4060 kind of falling in between and moving up to 1440p uh again at the Epic preset we once again see the 4060 falling in between the performance of the 30 60 12 gigabyte and the 6700 XT and here the uh the 4060 is good for about a 60 FPS average but the 6700 XT is pulling closer to 70 FPS although it's a little bit shy of it and the 3060s hanging out a little bit over 50 FPS range at 1440p Epic um let's move on to some uh cross platform games although current gen only and this is Star Wars Jedi Survivor which uses Unreal Engine 4 pushed all the way to its limits and at 1080p epic settings we actually see all gpus giving um very good experience here with the 3060 at around 60 frames per second the 40 60 18 ahead of that and the 6700 XT is 45 ahead of the 30 60. so again pulling well ahead of the other two gpus now if we turn on Ray tracing keep it at the Epic preset but turn on Ray tracing the 4060 is now still right around 60fps but the 3060s drop down into the upper 40s around 50 probably by the end of The Benchmark run but the 6700 XT is still a little bit ahead of the uh RTX 4060 despite this being a ray tracing enabled Benchmark now this is the most demanding Ray tracing game we'll certainly test some heavier ones later on but in lighter Ray tracing workloads like this the 6700 XT is ahead of the RTX 4060 moving up to 1440p Epic preset now none of our gpus are quite at a 60 FPS experience although the 6700 XT is 60fps at times and is going to finish this run um just a little shy of it in the mid 50s whereas the 40 60s down in the mid 40s 30 60 is under 40 FPS average the 4060 is 16 ahead of the 30 60 and the 6700 XT was 42 percent of the ahead of the 3060. but what if we turn on Ray tracing if we turn on Ray tracing uh all of them have their performance dip the 6700 XT is still in the mid 40s though it's pretty playable on a controller which a lot of people would use a controller for this type of game and it's still a little bit ahead of the RTX 4060 despite this being a ray tracing enabled title again could be a light Ray tracing workload also though the 6700 XD and the 3060 are trying to go over 8 gigabytes of vram so that's probably holding back the 4060 here a little bit now let's go ahead and move on to Unreal Engine 5 layers of fear is going to be probably a lot easier to run than the bigger uh spectacle games that we'll see later on with Unreal Engine 5. this is the first fully released third-party Unreal Engine 5 game and at 1080p High we see the 40 60 26 22 head of the 30 60 and the 6700 XT 28 ahead of the 3060. uh turning Ray tracing on which is basically using the Lumen lighting system still but in its Hardware accelerated version we now see the RTX 4060 slightly ahead of the 700 XT it's 18 ahead of the 30 60 and the 6700 XT is 14 of ahead of the 30 60s so a very small win um although the one percent lows are a little bit uh further ahead if we jump up to 1440p resolution and by the way the high preset in this game is as high as it goes it doesn't go beyond high this is the maximum preset the game offers I thought I should probably clarify that we see the 4060 kind of splitting the difference between the 3060 and the 6700 XT it's for only 14 ahead of the 30 60 the 6700 XD is 25 ahead of the 30 60. and once again when we turn on Ray tracing the 4060 and the 6700 XT are providing much of the same sort of experience although the 4060 is slightly ahead and uh in the one percent lows slightly more ahead but still not a massive difference and again the 36 the 40 60 is only 19 ahead of the 30 60 here um and let's jump into a plague tale Requiem this is not Unreal Engine this is the developer's own Uh custom engine here at 1080p ultra settings we once again see the 4060 kind of splitting the difference between the 3060 and the 6700 XT this game is not particularly vram hungry so the 40 60 16 head of the 3060 and the 6700 XT uh 29 ahead of the 30 60 so the 4060 falling in between there uh so once again um and also not a whole heck of a lot to see in the uh one percent lows here also kind of just splitting the difference if we go up to 1440p ultra settings all of the gpus are struggling a bit here um but the 6700 XT is still definitely the furthest ahead the 4060s lost a little bit of ground compared to the other two it's now 13 ahead of the 30 60 whereas the 6700 XT is 32 percent ahead now I will mention though that this game does feature dlss frame generation and does not have an fsr2 implementation uh so if you were using up scaling tech there would be an advantage there for the Nvidia gpus now an advantage for the AMD gpus is Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 if we tested out at the 1080p balance settings all the gpus here are delivering a high frame rate experience I think you'd very much be able to enjoy the game but the 4060 is 25 ahead of the 3060 here which and the 6700 XT is 49 ahead of the 3060 and generally I think this game seems to like cash um not not money cash although it likes that as well I'm sure um but if we move up to 1440p balanced we're now seeing the 40 60 24 of the head of the 360 but the 6700 XD has moved up to 56 out of the 30 60. and um yeah this this game tends to be a standout title for AMD gpus but I've noticed some of the 40 series gpus from Nvidia closing a bit more of that Gap and so I'm wondering like I said that it might be the fact that they have the larger L2 cache uh similar to how the 6000 Series has the infinity cache not sure but hey you want to see another game where the 3060 pulls ahead of the 40 60. let's look at some cross gen games here we have Resident Evil 4 remake at the 1080p Max setting which includes Ray tracing uh we use a lot more than eight gigabytes of vram and that sees the 3060 pull 14 ahead of the 40 60 and the 6700 XT is 39 ahead of the 40 60. the one percent lows are even more crazy with a 71 lead for the 30 60 over the 40 60 and over doubling the one percent lows on the 6700 XT now if we reduce it to the prioritized Graphics preset which I had some issues with where it was enabling fsr2 quality on some gpus but not others which I noticed part way through my test and I end up just having fsr2 enabled on all of them at the Quality setting anyway now they're back more into line with what we've been seeing more regularly which is the 40 60 about 20 21 ahead of the 30 60 and the 6700 XT 30 ahead of the 30 60. um whereas if we go up to 1440p and go back to the maximum settings which once again does include Ray tracing and I'm not upscaling uh we now see uh once again the 3060 pulling ahead of the 4060. so yeah that's a bit rough here for the New Gen card again obviously you can tweak settings to avoid this and it's even uh kind of worse in the one percent lows um but yeah it's just it's not good when you can find even if they're outlier cases where your newer generation product loses to the older generation product that just doesn't look good at 1440p prioritize Graphics but once again with fsr2 quality enabled uh they once again pull into more uh similar pattern with the 40 60 20 of the 30 60 older the 6700 XD pulls 38 ahead of the 3060 here so the 4060 kind of splitting that uh splitting that difference and they're all offering a very high frame rate experiences at those settings let's look at one more cross generation game with cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p Ultra and the 4060 here is only 11 ahead of the 3060 and the 6700 XD is only 25 ahead of the 30 60 but that still makes the 4060 kind of splitting the difference and again an 11 lead and only 9 the 1 lows uh it doesn't look that great for the 40 60 here the 6700 XD is 29 out of the 30 60 in the one percent lows now if we move up to 1440p resolution the 4060 dips to a single digit percentage lead over the 30 60 coming in with a nine percent lead on average and eight percent in the one percent lows whereas the 6700 XT is 29 ahead of the 30 60 and 30 percent in the one percent lows uh the 6700 XT is averaging just shy of 60 frames per second through this Benchmark run uh whereas the 4060 is just shy of 50 frames per second through this Benchmark run now what about uh uh going with some upscaling technology we should touch on that it is a distinguishing factor between the gpus um so at 1440p ultra settings there's no Ray tracing yet if we enable quality upscaling so that's dlss on the Nvidia gpus and fsr2 quality on the AMD GPU which I don't think looks as stable especially in motion so image quality Advantage here for dlss you can look at some other videos hardware and box has done a good image quality comparison here that's not really what I'm getting into here but here the 4060 is only six percent ahead of the 30 60 when you don't enable frame generation the 6700 XD performance wise is 26 ahead of the 3060 but again image quality not quite as good one percent lows are very similar now frame generation I'm also showing the results notice it does pull it ahead of the 6700 XT but it's not helping the um you know there's some more additional image quality artifacts that can come up as well as some latency considerations to consider I've done other videos talking a lot more more about that so it's not an Apples to Apples comparison it's not a real adfps experience like you would get on another GPU it's also not super far ahead of where the 6700 XT was with Native frames um anyway at let's look at some heavy duty Ray tracing so at 1080p RT Ultra and cyberpunk 2077 we do see the 6700 XT finally pull into last place with the 30 60 15 ahead and the 40 60 31 percent ahead the one percent lows it's 20 ahead on the 30 60 35 ahead on the 40 60 but none of them have a very good frame rate they're all around 30 frames per second uh which means none of them actually handle heavy duty Ray tracing at 1080p very well none of them do uh you would have to rely on upscaling and or frame generation look at the frame generation frame time graph right now it's stuttering I'm curious if it's spilling over its vram capacity uh because the 3060 is pushing right at about eight gigabytes and frame generation uses a little bit more than that so um it's one percent lows uh are actually worse on the 4060 than on the 3060 again I I think there could be a bit of a of a vram related issue there with frame gen anyway um I do think the 4060 offers the best possible experience out of the gpus um if you're using upscaling at 1080p to do heavy duty Ray tracing and then maybe using frame gen uh maybe we're running into vram issues though on that so this is not incredibly compelling although it is certainly doing something that the other gpus are uh struggling to do as well I'll talk to you more about it in my final thoughts section so for the RDX 4060 to win this review if there is such a thing it would need to replace my current recommendation for a 300 graphics card which has been the 6700 XT doing a little bit of division and based on the PC part pricker lowest prices available new the uh the 40 60 sorry the 6700xt costs three percent more than the RTX 4060s MSRP and does it usually deliver better than that in terms of performance yeah there are some situations like this extreme example where the 40 60s behind in the pack but even in many other situations uh where we're not vram constrained by choosing settings that that don't have a vram constraint we do usually see the 6700 XT noticeably better performance than the 4060 and that is in the vast majority of situations uh the only couple of situations we saw were the 4060 could match up the performance was with Ray tracing enabled and still often with Ray tracing enabled like in Star Wars Jedi Survivor RT on the 6700 XT usually still had a small lead these are in lighter Ray tracing workloads so the only situation where we saw a noticeable win uh for the 4060 over the 6700 XT was when we turned on some heavy duty Ray tracing but the thing is we actually look at the frame rate numbers up here when we do this the 4060 at 1080p RT Ultra is only getting barely over 30 frames per second okay so that's the thing is that it's kind of a pyrrhic victory when when it it takes cripplingly difficult Ray tracing settings to pull noticeably ahead of the competition now that being said Nvidia does have an upscaling advantage and so when you do enable upscaling it does look better it also has the option of using frame generation although we did see some stutters on the frame time graph when I enabled that at dlss quality um I thought it could be the fact that we're right up against an eight gigabytes of vram already at these settings and then frame generation might be using just a little bit over the top on that and when Nvidia gave a chance to show off RT and dlss early on this GPU they were wanting it to show with uh dlss balanced and I'm wondering if that was part of the reason why although also we're under 60 frames per second a lot more um when we're using dls's car quality here and the problem is that dlss at 1080p doesn't look great especially when you have to use it pretty aggressively now frame generation itself I have less of an issue with for example um if we were when I did my uh 1440p Ultra testing with dlss enabled and then frame gen I have less of a problem with this dls's quality at 1440p looks pretty good and frame gen from a high enough base frame rate which is kind of pushing up against is reasonable but it doesn't always get you this massive boost like that's not that big of a boost is it even that far ahead of the 6700 XT without frame generation although dlss does look better than fsr2 so the main thing I'd say here is that um the 4060 has to really reach for those special features to find any reason to recommend it over a 6700 XT and so in the vast majority of games of current gen games that I'm testing here we see the 6700 XT with a noticeable win over the RTX 4060 and the higher the settings and the more vram hungry that they get uh the larger that Gap can be even to the point where we can see the 30 60 12 gigabyte even pulling ahead of the 4060 although this was a pretty isolated result usually when the vram was was an issue it wasn't having the um the 4060 in it behind it was more frequently ending up about tide so that brings me to my next question should you buy a 30 60 12 gigabyte instead out of a 40 68 gigabyte um so we jump back to the calculator for a second at current pricing the 40 60 is seven percent more expensive than the 280 dollar price point where you can find the cheapest uh 30 60 12 gigabytes and it does usually offer other than in situations where you're spilling over the vram capacity uh which you can adjust settings like going down to high for example to remove that barrier um it is usually more than seven percent faster now you do have that issue where okay you're gonna have to be more mindful of Your vram Capacity which is a little bit annoying but in general if somebody let me put this way if somebody was offering me a 30 60 12 gigabyte or 40 68 gigabyte I would take the 4060. it is usually noticeably faster um often times twenty percent faster but as we've seen it can be down in the teens or even you know single digit percentage wins or even again again in some outlier cases where the vram is particularly heavy it can come out behind but like I said I think that is more of the exception rather than the rule so if you offer me both cards I would take the 40 60 there's a few other nice thing things to point out it's only drawing 100 Watts a lot of the time whereas the other two gpus are closer to 180 or more watts a lot of the time so um also I think rdna 2 under reports it's it's wattage to the um uh the program I'm using here because I don't think it reports um the entire board power I think it's just the GPU power so the 6700 XD is drawing the most power here so if if you're like trying to upgrade something with a pretty small power supply and didn't want to mess with the power supply I mean maybe uh that would also be something to take into consideration but just in general I do think the 4060 is a better GPU it's much more energy efficient it's usually I'm talking compared to the 3060 here it's much more energy efficient um it is usually faster although you will have to be more mindful of the of settings that could be spilling over your vram where it uh doesn't usually take a loss but can as we're seeing here um but then it does again have a frame generation which is nice uh it's nice to have I've again talked about this so much in other videos it's a situational feature uh it adds a bit of latency so you're not going to want to use it in competitive situations and it uh you know not every game has it and even if it does have it you need a high enough base frame rate for it to be good and then depending on the game image quality especially depending on what's going on with HUD elements in the games and things like that sometimes those don't play nicely with frame generation I still do think it's a nice to have and I do use it myself in certain games I liked it a lot in plague tale I actually do use it sometimes in cyberpunk actually without using dlss quality um I just use frame generation with no upscaling um because I actually find sometimes the image artifacts again when you're at a high enough bass frame rate or actually sometimes less noticeable with frame generation than they are with um the upscaling tech which I find um sometimes has issues with with aliasing in motion and things like that that's really a topic for another video but it is again a value-added feature um so yeah I would definitely think the 4060 is in upgrade overall it also has an av1 encoder that the 3060 and 6700 XD don't which is good for streaming to YouTube right now I think is a supported streaming app on that one um so all in all is the 4060 better than the 3060 yes by very much no it's a if it came in at the same MSRP as the 3060 this would be an extreme disaster the fact that they did actually reduce its MSRP to 300 instead of 330 dollars at least goes some way towards me not hating the card as much as I could have um uh but I do think it would have been a lot nicer to see around the 250 dollar Mark and call the 40 50 or a 40 50 TI um that would have been that would have been an exciting card at 300 um until they dry up and aren't available I'm gonna recommend the 6700 XT uh unless you just have to have Nvidia and so that will be the last thing that I will mention here is if you are deciding between gpus um they have their strengths and weaknesses and if you're deciding between uh AMD and Nvidia I'm reviewing gaming performance here you if you use your GPU for professional workloads you're going to want to research that topic separately there are a lot of um apps that are programmed with the market leader in mind Cuda core acceleration that kind of thing I think things like blender and all that again I'm not an expert on productivity apps I test gaming performance you're going to want to look into whether your workload would work well on an AMD GPU and if you're using these for productivity that's another interesting thing to talk about between the 3060 and the 4060 because in certain productivity apps vram capacity is actually very important and having 12 gigabytes on a slightly slower card might actually be better than having eight gigabytes on a slightly faster card so again I'm not testing productivity apps in this video but I would highly encourage you if you're buying this a GPU in this price range for productivity reasons that you research your workflow um first of all does is it supported well on AMD and if it's if it's not you're buying Nvidia is is the 12 gigabytes of vram capacity going to be more helpful than these slightly faster GPU and the av1 encoder so just things to consider overall um again I considered for the 4060 to win this review it would have to disrupt my current recommendation in these in the 300 price point one of the Staples of my channel is a monthly GPU buyer byte buyer guide excuse me by price point and if the 6700 XT remains available for around 300 it's going to continue to get my 300 GPU uh recommendation I hope this was useful for you guys I'm planning on doing a whole bunch more of these head-to-head type comparisons using the 4060 as well as all the other gpus that I benchmarked to prepare for this I have retested my 3050 my 3060 as you saw here my 3060 TI my 4060 um my 2060 I retested my 1066 gigabyte and a bunch of AMD gpus um I retested my 6700 non XT as well as the XT you saw in this video my 6600 XT my 6600 non-xt as well as the Intel Arc a750 and a770 so I've retested all of those gpus in these same games and settings that you just saw here and I'm planning on releasing a ton of head-to-head comparisons both comparison to them comparing them against the 4060 but we could also look at some that don't include the 4060s so I'm interested in the comments section uh if you guys have out of those gpus I just listed which ones you would like to see uh compared against each other when I do these side-by-side comparisons it's difficult to fit like these really work best with two gpus three is kind of the limit when it gets to four it gets really cluttered on the screen but is somewhat doable uh which is why I don't do all of them in one single video because I think there's a lot of value in being able to see things like the frame time graph and the stat counters up here where if you reduce all of this down to a uh you know bar graphs with all the gpus on it I think that's extremely valuable but lots of other channels bigger than mine already have you covered on bar graphs with all the gpus on it I think the value I can add to that is the more detailed head-to-head comparisons and follow-up coverage uh so like I said let me know what you guys want to see related to that and a huge thank you to channel members who have clicked the join Button as well as Channel subscribers all of the support guys I spent so long benchmarking for all those uh it's it's lucky I'm on my summer break right now as a teacher else I would not have had time to test all of those anyway and having all of that support is the motivation required for me to be staying up late at night uh benchmarking things and editing together this footage I'm very tired right now and I have some other uh side by sides I need to start getting ready for my next few days worth of videos by the time you see this uh anyway I hope all of you have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

Views: 296,068

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Id: 9O7Ij5rOqso

Length: 31min 22sec (1882 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023