Introduction
The ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Dual OC is the company’s most affordable custom design RTX 4060, priced bang on the NVIDIA MSRP of $300. ASUS is looking to pamper gamers shopping for an RTX 4060 at these prices, with a product design and features you’d normally find in premium custom-design cards priced above MSRP. The new RTX 4060 by NVIDIA succeeds a long line of extremely popular mainstream GPUs by NVIDIA, including the RTX 3060, RTX 2060, and GTX 1060, which dominate the Steam Hardware Survey charts for user base. The same survey also suggests that over two-thirds of PC gamers still play at 1080p resolution, and so NVIDIA would want to sell these games a cutting-edge new graphics card at $300 that scores big on features and efficiency.
The GeForce RTX 4060 is based on the latest Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, which has two strengths going for it that would make you consider the new card over older generation cards selling for discounts. First, since it’s based on Ada, the RTX 4060 gets DLSS 3, a swanky new feature that nearly doubles frame-rates at no image quality loss, by using AI to draw alternate frames, without involving the graphics rendering machinery. NVIDIA claims that DLSS 3 is easy to integrate with existing game engines, and its adoption is on the rise. The second big thing the RTX 4060 has going for it is energy efficiency. Not only is the RTX 4060 built on the new 5 nm EUV foundry process, but also NVIDIA’s smallest silicon for this generation, the AD107, which it maxes out.
The RTX 4060 enables all 24 streaming multiprocessors (SM) present on the AD107, which works out to 3,072 CUDA cores, 96 Tensor cores, 24 RT cores, and 96 TMUs. The chip features 48 ROPs, and a memory interface that’s similar to that of the AD106 powering the RTX 4060 Ti—you get 8 GB of 17 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit memory interface. Both the memory bus width and memory size have been generationally reduced compared to the RTX 3060 by 50%, but NVIDIA claims that its re-designed memory sub-system that relies on large last-level caches on the silicon, help them reduce the round-trips to the video memory. It may be the smallest Ada silicon, but the AD107 packs 50% more transistors than the GA106 powering the RTX 3060.
The ASUS RTX 4060 Dual OC is an attempt at offering customers the best MSRP-priced RTX 4060 graphics card. The card looks visually appealing for its price-segment, and packs a handful of features rivaling premium custom-design cards. To begin with, it offers factory-overclocked speeds of 2505 MHz boost compared to 2460 MHz reference. Next up, the card offers a segment-exclusive dual-BIOS, letting you toggle between the P-BIOS with these overclocked speeds, and an alternative BIOS that prioritizes low cooler noise at reference speeds.
Our goal with the videos is to create short summaries, not go into all the details and test results, which can be found in our written reviews.
| Price | Cores | ROPs | Core Clock | Boost Clock | Memory Clock | GPU | Transistors | Memory | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RX 6500 XT | $150 | 1024 | 32 | 2685 MHz | 2825 MHz | 2248 MHz | Navi 24 | 5400M | 4 GB, GDDR6, 64-bit |
| RTX 2060 | $170 | 1920 | 48 | 1365 MHz | 1680 MHz | 1750 MHz | TU106 | 10800M | 6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit |
| RX 5700 XT | $150 | 2560 | 64 | 1605 MHz | 1755 MHz | 1750 MHz | Navi 10 | 10300M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 3050 | $210 | 2560 | 32 | 1552 MHz | 1777 MHz | 1750 MHz | GA106 | 12000M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| RTX 2070 | $210 | 2304 | 64 | 1410 MHz | 1620 MHz | 1750 MHz | TU106 | 10800M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| Arc A750 | $240 | 3584 | 112 | 2050 MHz | N/A | 2000 MHz | ACM-G10 | 21700M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RX 6600 | $170 | 1792 | 64 | 2044 MHz | 2491 MHz | 1750 MHz | Navi 23 | 11060M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| RX 6600 XT | $210 | 2048 | 64 | 2359 MHz | 2589 MHz | 2000 MHz | Navi 23 | 11060M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| RTX 3060 | $260 | 3584 | 48 | 1320 MHz | 1777 MHz | 1875 MHz | GA106 | 12000M | 12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit |
| RX 7600 | $250 | 2048 | 64 | 2250 MHz | 2625 MHz | 2250 MHz | Navi 33 | 13300M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| RTX 4060 | $300 | 3072 | 48 | 1830 MHz | 2460 MHz | 2125 MHz | AD107 | 18900M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| ASUS RTX 4060 Dual OC | $300 | 3072 | 48 | 1830 MHz | 2505 MHz | 2125 MHz | AD107 | 18900M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| Arc A770 | $290 | 4096 | 128 | 2100 MHz | N/A | 2187 MHz | ACM-G10 | 21700M | 16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 2080 | $240 | 2944 | 64 | 1515 MHz | 1710 MHz | 1750 MHz | TU104 | 13600M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 3060 Ti | $300 | 4864 | 80 | 1410 MHz | 1665 MHz | 1750 MHz | GA104 | 17400M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 4060 Ti | $380 | 4352 | 48 | 2310 MHz | 2535 MHz | 2250 MHz | AD106 | 22900M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| RX 6700 XT | $310 | 2560 | 64 | 2424 MHz | 2581 MHz | 2000 MHz | Navi 22 | 17200M | 12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit |
| RTX 2080 Ti | $380 | 4352 | 88 | 1350 MHz | 1545 MHz | 1750 MHz | TU102 | 18600M | 11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit |
| RTX 3070 | $320 | 5888 | 96 | 1500 MHz | 1725 MHz | 1750 MHz | GA104 | 17400M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 3070 Ti | $400 | 6144 | 96 | 1575 MHz | 1770 MHz | 1188 MHz | GA104 | 17400M | 8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit |
| RX 6800 | $430 | 3840 | 96 | 1815 MHz | 2105 MHz | 2000 MHz | Navi 21 | 26800M | 16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
Architecture
The Ada graphics architecture heralds the third generation of the NVIDIA RTX technology, an effort toward increasing the realism of game visuals by leveraging real-time ray tracing, without the enormous amount of compute power required to draw purely ray-traced 3D graphics. This is done by blending conventional raster graphics with ray traced elements such as reflections, lighting, and global illumination, to name a few. The 3rd generation of RTX introduces the new higher IPC “Ada” CUDA core, 3rd generation RT core, 4th generation Tensor core, and the new Optical Flow Processor, a component that plays a key role in generating new frames without involving the GPU’s main graphics rendering pipeline.
The GeForce Ada graphics architecture driving the RTX 4060 leverages the TSMC 5 nm EUV foundry process to increase transistor counts. At the heart of this GPU is the new AD107 silicon, with a transistor count of 18.9 billion, which is almost 60% higher than that of the previous-generation GA106, and about 9% more than the GA104. The GPU features a generationally narrower PCI-Express 4.0 x8 host interface, and a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface. This is causing some controversy, and we’ll present NVIDIA’s explanation below. The Optical Flow Accelerator (OFA) is an independent top-level component. For the RTX 4060, the chip features one 8th Gen NVENC and one 5th Gen NVDEC unit, including hardware-acceleration for the AV1 format.
The essential component hierarchy is similar to past generations of NVIDIA GPUs. The AD107 silicon features 3 Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), each of these has all the SIMD and graphics rendering machinery, and is a small GPU in its own right. Each GPC shares a raster engine (geometry processing components) and two ROP partitions (each with eight ROP units). The GPC of the AD107 contains four Texture Processing Clusters (TPCs), the main number-crunching machinery. Each of these has two Streaming Multiprocessors (SM), and a Polymorph unit. Each SM contains 128 CUDA cores across four partitions. Half of these CUDA cores are pure-FP32; while the other half is capable of FP32 or INT32. The SM retains concurrent FP32+INT32 math processing capability. The SM also contains a 3rd generation RT core, four 4th generation Tensor cores, some cache memory, and four TMUs. There are 8 SM per GPC, so 1,024 CUDA cores, 32 Tensor cores, and 8 RT cores; per GPC. There are three such GPCs, which add up to 3,072 CUDA cores, 96 TMUs, 96 Tensor Cores, and 24 RT cores. There are 48 ROPs on the silicon. The AD107 features a 24 MB L2 cache, which is smaller than the 32 MB on the AD106 powering the RTX 4060 Ti.
3rd Gen RT Core and Ray Tracing
The 3rd generation RT core accelerates the most math-intensive aspects of real-time ray tracing, including BVH traversal. Displaced micro-mesh engine is a revolutionary feature introduced with the new 3rd generation RT core. Just as mesh shaders and tessellation have had a profound impact on improving performance with complex raster geometry, allowing game developers to significantly increase geometric complexity; DMMs is a method to reduce the complexity of the bounding-volume hierarchy (BVH) data-structure, which is used to determine where a ray hits geometry. Previously, the BVH had to capture even the smallest details to properly determine the intersection point. Ada’s ray tracing architecture also receives a major performance uplift from Shader Execution Reordering (SER), a software-defined feature that requires awareness from game-engines, to help the GPU reorganize and optimize worker threads associated with ray tracing.
The BVH now needn’t have data for every single triangle on an object, but can represent objects with complex geometry as a coarse mesh of base triangles, which greatly simplifies the BVH data structure. A simpler BVH means less memory consumed and helps to greatly reduce ray tracing CPU load, because the CPU only has to generate a smaller structure. With older “Ampere” and “Turing” RT cores, each triangle on an object had to be sampled at high overhead, so the RT core could precisely calculate ray intersection for each triangle. With Ada, the simpler BVH, plus the displacement maps can be sent to the RT core, which is now able to figure out the exact hit point on its own. NVIDIA has seen 11:1 to 28:1 compression in total triangle counts. This reduces BVH compile times by 7.6x to over 15x, in comparison to the older RT core; and reducing its storage footprint by anywhere between 6.5 to 20 times. DMMs could reduce disk- and memory bandwidth utilization, utilization of the PCIe bus, as well as reduce CPU utilization. NVIDIA worked with Simplygon and Adobe to add DMM support for their tool chains.
Opacity Micro Meshes
Opacity Micro Meshes (OMM) is a new feature introduced with Ada to improve rasterization performance, particularly with objects that have alpha (transparency data). Most low-priority objects in a 3D scene, such as leaves on a tree, are essentially rectangles with textures on the leaves where the transparency (alpha) creates the shape of the leaf. RT cores have a hard time intersecting rays with such objects, because they’re not really in the shape that they appear (they’re really just rectangles with textures that give you the illusion of shape). Previous-generation RT cores had to have multiple interactions with the rendering stage to figure out the shape of a transparent object, because they couldn’t test for alpha by themselves.
This has been solved by using OMMs. Just as DMMs simplify geometry by creating meshes of micro-triangles; OMMs create meshes of rectangular textures that align with parts of the texture that aren’t alpha, so the RT core has a better understanding of the geometry of the object, and can correctly calculate ray intersections. This has a significant performance impact on shading performance in non-RT applications, too. Practical applications of OMMs aren’t just low-priority objects such as vegetation, but also smoke-sprites and localized fog. Traditionally there was a lot of overdraw for such effects, because they layered multiple textures on top of each other, that all had to be fully processed by the shaders. Now only the non-opaque pixels get executed—OMMs provide a 30 percent speedup with graphics buffer fill-rates, and a 10 percent impact on frame-rates.This has been solved by using OMMs. Just as DMMs simplify geometry by creating meshes of micro-triangles; OMMs create meshes of rectangular textures that align with parts of the texture that aren’t alpha, so the RT core has a better understanding of the geometry of the object, and can correctly calculate ray intersections. This has a significant performance impact on shading performance in non-RT applications, too. Practical applications of OMMs aren’t just low-priority objects such as vegetation, but also smoke-sprites and localized fog. Traditionally there was a lot of overdraw for such effects, because they layered multiple textures on top of each other, that all had to be fully processed by the shaders. Now only the non-opaque pixels get executed—OMMs provide a 30 percent speedup with graphics buffer fill-rates, and a 10 percent impact on frame-rates.
DLSS 3 Frame Generation
DLSS 3 introduces a revolutionary new feature that promises a doubling in frame-rate at comparable quality, it’s called AI frame-generation. Building on DLSS 2 and its AI super-resolution (scaling up a lower-resolution frame to native resolution with minimal quality loss); DLSS 3 can generate entire frames simply using AI, without involving the graphics rendering pipeline, it’s also possible to enable frame generation at native resolution without upscaling. Later in the article, we will show you DLSS 3 in action.
Every alternating frame with DLSS 3 is hence AI-generated, without being a replica of the previous rendered frame. This is possible only on the Ada graphics architecture, because of a hardware component called the optical flow accelerator (OFA), which assists in predicting what the next frame could look like, by creating what NVIDIA calls an optical flow-field. OFA ensures that the DLSS 3 algorithm isn’t confused by static objects in a rapidly-changing 3D scene (such as a race sim). The process heavily relies on the performance uplift introduced by the FP8 math format of the 4th generation Tensor core. A third key ingredient of DLSS 3 is Reflex. By reducing the rendering queue to zero, Reflex plays a vital role in ensuring that latency with DLSS 3 enabled is at an acceptable level. A combination of OFA and the 4th Gen Tensor core is why the Ada architecture is required to use DLSS 3, and why it won’t work on older architectures.
Ada Rebalanced Memory Subsystem
The previous-generation GeForce RTX 3060 featured a 192-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface driving its 12 GB of 14 Gbps-rated GDDR6 memory, which has caused some controversy with the RTX 4060 using a narrower 128-bit wide memory interface to drive 8 GB of 17 Gbps memory. With the new Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, NVIDIA has tried to re-balance the memory sub-system such that there’s dependence on larger on-die caches, allowing NVIDIA to narrow down the GPU’s GDDR6 memory interface. The obvious benefit of this to NVIDIA is reduced costs, let’s make no mistake about it, but NVIDIA maintains that this isn’t a big problem for the GPU.
The last-level cache, or L2 cache, of NVIDIA Ada GPUs is anywhere between 8-10 times larger than the ones on the previous-generation Ampere GPUs. The AD107 silicon powering the RTX 4060 has a 24 MB L2 cache, compared to the 2 MB of the GA107 silicon powering the RTX 3050, and 3 MB of the GA106 powering the RTX 3060. NVIDIA illustrated an example of how the larger on-die LLC reduces video memory pressure (trips to GDDR6) by anywhere between 40% to 60% on the same GPU, by soaking up a larger number of memory access requests by the shaders.
The L2 cache is unified victim cache to the GPU’s various GPCs and their local TPCs. Data that isn’t hot enough (frequently accessed enough) to be resident on the small L1 caches of the SM, is ejected to the L2 cache, and depending on its heat, pushed to the GDDR6 video memory. The L2 cache is an order of magnitude faster than than video memory in terms of latency, and so having frequently-accessed data reside there offers a considerable benefit
As we mentioned earlier from NVIDIA’s claims, this re-balancing of the memory sub-system between the on-die LLC and video memory lowers the GPU’s access to the latter by as much as 60%, which means the GPU can make do with a narrower 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus. NVIDIA has used generationally faster 17 Gbps memory chips in the RTX 4060. NVIDIA developed a new means of presenting the memory bandwidth that takes into account the contribution of the L2 cache, its hit-rate, and the consequent reduction in video memory traffic. While the memory bandwidth of the RTX 4060 is 272 GB/s, NVIDIA claims that its “effective bandwidth” is 453 GB/s. It’s interesting to point out that NVIDIA has used “effective bandwidth” figures in the past to highlight its lossless memory compression technologies, but has never been this vocal about it.
Source TechPowerUp. Continue reading at ASUS GeForce RTX 4060 Dual OC Review – The Best RTX 4060 | TechPowerUp
