Last month, something strange happened. The RTX 4060 shot up to the top of the Steam hardware survey, representing 8.37% of PC gamers surveyed. The number has dropped since then, but the RTX 4060 constantly dashes between first and second place in Valve's monthly survey. Even at a lower percentage, the RTX 4060 represents a massive number of PC gamers; with close to a billion estimated PC gamers around the world, the RTX 4060 represents tens of millions of players across the globe.

It's time for a check-up.

It's been close to two years since the RTX 4060 first hit the shelves, and at the time, Nvidia promised a premium 1080p gaming experience between raw GPU horsepower and the ever-present DLSS. The card was met with criticism at the time, but it's clearly caught on among PC gamers. And after seeing how it performs in the latest games, I finally understand why.

Putting the RTX 4060 through its paces

Let's see if Nvidia's claims hold up

GPU reviews are great for understanding how a new graphics card compares to other options on the market, but the benchmarking process usually sacrifices the gameplay experience for objective data. I took a different approach here. Rather than focusing on an apples-to-apples comparison, I adjusted the settings for each game I tested in order to get the best performance. Still, I put a few stipulations on the testing.

Everything was done at 1080p. Outside of that, I had to run the game with the highest graphics preset, and if ray tracing was available, turn it on. That basically isolates DLSS as the main performance driver. In some games I pushed DLSS harder than I did in others, and in some titles I used Frame Generation. The idea is to see what kind of performance you'll get in games released in the past year if you're after 1080p at Ultra settings. I also tested what I would classify as the most demanding sections of the games here; more on that with the benchmarks.

The goal in every game is triple digits. If the RTX 4060 can deliver at or close to a triple-digit average at 1080p Ultra with DLSS running, that's a win. At over 60 fps, it's a loss. And below that mark, it's a failure. A win gives the card a score of 10, a loss counts as 5, and a complete failure counts as 1, and I'll average the performance out to see where the card ranks with the latest, most demanding games.

I'm looking at real-world performance here. If you jumped on the bandwagon and bought an RTX 4060 today, this is the kind of performance you'd expect. More importantly, this is the experience the majority of gamers, at least based on the numbers, are getting. There are some stumbles, but overall, I understand why the RTX 4060 is so popular.

Judging the RTX 4060's performance in 2025

A lot of good, but a decent dash of disappointing

Enough preamble. Let's get to the benchmarks. Below, you can see the 10 games I tested, all of which were released within the past 12 months on PC. Using the scoring system I outlined, the RTX 4060 earned an average of 7.1 out of 10 points; a C minus, if you assigned it a letter grade. That's a passing grade, but not an ideal one. However, there are a few specific reasons why the RTX 4060 is knocked down a couple of letter grades.

Let's deal with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle first. You can play this game with the RTX 4060, and you can get decent performance if you use one of the lower graphics presets with DLSS. However, the game refused to load after I switched to the Ultra preset -- that's two steps below the maximum graphics preset, for what it's worth -- instead throwing up a "failed to allocate video memory" error. This game is notoriously tough on your VRAM, but I don't suspect most PC gamers to understand how texture streaming works in idTech 7. So, I'm counting this game as a failure.

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 also gave me a memory error when switching to the Ultra preset at 1080p, despite the fact that it was the top-performing game I tested outside of Path of Exile 2. Still, the performance held up, there weren't any stutters, and I didn't notice pop-in issues with textures.

The game where I encountered the most issues was, ironically, the Nvidia-promoted Half-Life 2 RTX. The average performance was fine by the numbers, and I counted this game accordingly in my scoring. The experience of playing wasn't great, though. As you can see from the 1% low average, the game consistently devolved into a brief mess of stuttering when something big was happening on screen, such as an exploding barrel. For this game, as well as the other titles that support it, I turned on path tracing to get the true 1080p Ultra experience that Nvidia markets. It's possible to get playable performance this way, but the RTX 4060 certainly compromises.

Although I largely stuck with the rules I outlined above, there were a couple of exceptions. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth doesn't have DLSS quality settings. It uses dynamic resolution, and by default, it goes between 50% internal resolution up to 100%. I left the dynamic resolution at this setting. I tested this game in the open world to see how it held up in the most demanding scenarios, which is true of every game I tested. I was fighting a monster in Monster Hunter Wilds while testing, and I was being swarmed by trash mobs in Path of Exile 2.

The other exception is Black Myth: Wukong. This game is extremely demanding, even on flagship hardware. Because of that, I used the Very High preset rather than the top Cinematic preset. A few Unreal Engine 5 games, including Wukong and Lords of the Fallen, include this Cinematic option that feels more like a "Very Ultra" mode moreso than the top preset. You give up very little in the way of visual quality, so it makes sense that you'd play Wukong this way on the RTX 4060.

A passing grade for the RTX 4060

But one big problem remains

The performance of the RTX 4060 is solid, and for everything short of games on the bleeding edge of rendering technology, you're getting a great 1080p experience with frame rates often in the triple digits. That's not to mention the performance you can expect in older single-player games, as well as the evergreen multiplayer titles that routinely top the Steam charts. There's one major issue with the RTX 4060, though, and that's VRAM capacity.

This isn't a new criticism. Nvidia has been roundly critiqued for its lacking VRAM capacity over the past two generations, showing up most recently with the RTX 5060 Ti. It's a topic that will come back up with the base RTX 5060, as well. With the raw GPU horsepower of the RTX 4060, plus Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS suite, you can get excellent performance in the most demanding games available today, even when flicking on full path tracing. The issues only come up when run out of frame buffer.

Stutters in Half-Life 2 RTX and being forced to launch Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in safe mode to flick down to the lowest graphics preset are symptoms of the issue with 8GB of VRAM. Even at 1080p, it's becoming increasingly clear that 8GB of VRAM isn't enough. At the very least, it's not enough if Nvidia wants to continue framing its 60-class offerings as targeting a premium 1080p gaming experience. Even when leveraging DLSS to its full potential and focusing purely on the gameplay experience, I ran into issues.

Mainstream GPUs need a lifeline

Mainstream GPUs aren't dead, and based on the performance DLSS can deliver, I'd say they're far from it. The main hurdle is the 8GB frame buffer. Intel has already rectified the issue with the Arc B580, and both Nvidia and AMD have recognized the problem; Nvidia with the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti, and AMD with the RX 7600 XT. It's just time to actually do something about the problem.