Nvidia's GeForce 1060, 2060, and 3060 graphics cards are some of the most widely used GPUs in all of PC gaming. Four of Steam's top five GPUs are 60-series cards, and the only one that isn't is an even lower-end GTX 1650.

All of this is to say that, despite all the fanfare for high-end products like the RTX 4090, the new GeForce RTX 4060 is Nvidia's most important Ada Lovelace-based GPU. History suggests that it will become a baseline for game developers to aim for and the go-to recommendation for most entry-level-to-mainstream PC gaming builds.

The RTX 4060, which launches this week starting at $299, is mostly up to the task. It's faster and considerably more power efficient than the 3060 it replaces, and it doesn't come with the same generation-over-generation price hike as the higher-end Lovelace GPUs. It's also a solid value compared to the 4060 Ti, typically delivering between 80 and 90 percent of the 4060 Ti's performance for 75 percent of the money.

That doesn't mean there aren't small things to gripe about. Stepping down from the 3060's 12GB of memory to a stingier 8GB doesn't feel great, especially when poorly optimized PC ports seem to want as much video memory as they can get. It's only a modest speed upgrade over the RTX 3060. And DLSS Frame Generation, the big new 4000-series feature that Nvidia plays up in all of its announcements, is less impressive on midrange cards than it is on high-end ones.

The RTX 4060 Ti was an outlier compared to the 3060 Ti, shipping with fewer of Nvidia's CUDA cores and half the memory bandwidth and leaning on boosted clock speeds, additional L2 cache, and other architectural upgrades to close the gap. The result was a card that didn't always feel like much of an upgrade, especially at higher resolutions.

The RTX 4060 looks a lot like the 4060 Ti did, narrowing the memory interface a bit compared to the RTX 3060 (from 192-bit to 128-bit) and dropping the number of CUDA cores but adding extra L2 cache and boosting clocks. The 4060 uses Nvidia's AD107 GPU die, the fifth-largest Ada Lovelace die after the AD102 (4090), AD103 (4080), AD104 (4070 series), and AD106 (4060 Ti). There are fewer CUDA cores and less L2 cache here (24MB for the 4060, compared to 32MB for the 4060 Ti), and the card uses eight lanes of PCI Express 4.0 rather than the typical 16. This shouldn't be limiting at all for PCIe 4.0-based systems, but you could see marginal performance impacts if you install the card in an older PCIe 3.0-based system.

Less hardware running at lower speeds also means lower power usage, and the 4060's maximum power usage is just 115 W, compared to 160 W for the 4060 Ti, 170 W for the old 3060, and 165 W for AMD's Radeon RX 7600—the 4060's closest competitor in AMD's 7000-series lineup. Like the other 4000-series cards, the 4060 adds support for Nvidia's DLSS 3 upscaling and frame rate-boosting technologies, plus hardware-accelerated encoding support for the AV1 video codec.

As far as we can tell, Nvidia isn't making a Founders Edition version of the 4060, leaving the job to its card partners. Our review model is an RTX 4060 8GB Verto provided by PNY, and it's the kind of no-frills card you'd expect to get for $299. It's a reasonably sized card that should fit well in any micro ATX case and most mini ITX cases, its two-fan cooler keeps the GPU running cool and quiet, and it gets all its power from a single 8-pin connector, so you don't need to worry about a bulky 12VHPWR adapter (or finding a new ATX 3.0 power supply). It doesn't have LEDs or a particularly flashy design, but it gets the job done.

As with PNY's version of the 4060 Ti, even this relatively modest cooler design hangs a few inches past the end of the actual graphics card; hopefully this will lead to even more-compact designs, though it seems like the GPU makers have spent most of their time and attention on three-fan triple-slot overkill versions of the 4060 Ti.