The graphics cards in the Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series from Nvidia are not just badly priced, they have bad specs too. At least if rumors are to be believed.
More than a month ago, rumored specs for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 were leaked. They were very disappointing to say the least. Not only they were bad, they were lesser powerful than it’s predecessor, the RTX 3060 from the previous generation.
While, RTX 3060 had 3584 CUDA cores, RTX 4060 is rumored to have 3072. Not only that, RTX 3060 originally came with 12GB VRAM, with 8GB VRAM version coming later. Whereas RTX 4060 seems to stick with just 8GB from the start. It’s said that RTX 4060 might cut the memory bus too, from the 192-bit found in 3060 to just 128-bit.
Looking at above, one might wonder why would Nvidia be so generous with RTX 4050. Looks like the cutting of specifications might continue with RTX 4050 too.
RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4050 Release Date Leaked
Well known Twitter based leaker MEGAsizeGPU has revealed possible release dates for Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4050 graphics cards.
The tweet hints that the RTX 4060 Ti for the desktops is going to come in the later parts of the month of May.
It further states that the desktop version of RTX 4050 is going to release in June. With release date for the RTX 4060 not decided by Nvidia yet.
Looks very interesting. Thought very much delayed, it’s still acceptable. But what follows is something that should concern everyone.
RTX 4050 Might Have Only 6GB VRAM
When asked by another user about whether any information is available about the RTX 4050 specs, MEGAsizeGPU revealed that RTX 4050 has only 6GB of graphics card memory.
If that is not enough, it’s expected that RTX 4050 is going to come with just 96-bit bus.
Bad Move By Nvidia
If this comes out to be true, then it’s going to be an extremely bad move by Nvidia. For many reasons.
The RTX 40 series cards are horribly priced. RTX 4050 is not going to be a $100-150 graphics card, it’s going to be a card which is likely going to be priced around $249 to $299, if not higher.
The second reason is, these days we are seeing how some games are performing badly even with 8GB VRAM at 1080p. That too without ray tracing enabled. So this move of having only 6GB VRAM will make sure that the RTX 4050 may not be able to play games at 1080p properly at 60 FPS. Something which is a standard since more than a decade. It doesn’t cost a lot to add 2GB of extra VRAM chip to a graphics card, but Nvidia seems to think otherwise.
Not only that, the Steam Hardware Survey shows how budget graphics card users comprise a huge chunk of gamers. So them being ignored and treated like this is nothing to be cheerful about.
The only good thing we can say that it’s going to be the first card after a long time, possibly ever, to cost so much and yet not require any external 8-pin power connection as the card is likely going to be very power efficient. Not sure if the price to power efficiency ratio is something that Nvidia should be proud about here.
Another thing is that we don’t know how many CUDA cores and other things it’s going to have. It’s likely to follow the RTX 4060 and cut the specs from the RTX 3050, rather than increasing them.
Nor do we know what type of offering AMD is going to have in its competition.
Hopefully both Nvidia and AMD are able to release better cards at cheaper rates for everyone.
