The Nvidia RTX 4060 was released this week, and the early numbers are not looking good at certain retailers, in what could be a disastrous launch for Nvidia.
Nvidia’s RTX 4060 came out this week, but it seems to have not made as much of a big splash as Nvidia might have hoped, according to a report from 3DCenter. The company polls stock levels at leading German retailer MindFactory, which has only sold around 10 units of the GPU since its official release yesterday.
For some context, The RTX 4070 was considered to have a slower run rate when compared to other graphics cards, and that still managed to shift over 300 units in the hours following its official launch. It appears that despite the attractive price point, gamers are just not interested in picking up a graphics card with such a minimal rasterization performance uplift when compared to previous-generation cards, as we note in our review.
The community hits back at Nvidia
Users in the /r/Nvidia subreddit commented: “I keep scratching my head, why [is] Nvidia bother releasing these.”, while others also claim that Nvidia is just waiting for people to buy the newest products.
Another user states “It’s [a] 4050, it shouldn’t get 60-series naming”, referencing the GPU die cutdown that the GPU is using, which is usually reserved for cards like the GTX 1650 and RTX 3050, instead of a traditional 60-class card.
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“Nvidia are hurting only themselves. It would have been incredible as a $199 4050, since it literally is the 4050 using AD107. But instead they decided to call it the 4060 and now it looks way less impressive.” comments another user, noting how the pricing should have reflected the die cutdown that the GPU is using. However, many users are holding out that Nvidia and its AIB partners will eventually reduce the price of the 4060 in order to match performance expectations.
The 50-series problem
From a business standpoint, Nvidia could potentially be priming users for the RTX 50-series. The costs to manufacture increasingly smaller nodes are getting exponentially more expensive, so in order to keep prices relatively attractive to consumers, Nvidia could be preparing to get expectations for chip cutdowns in place during the 40-series. Should the 50-series provide an appropriate boost in performance, it could work out. But, this all remains speculative until we have more detail on the upcoming GPU generation.