CheckMag | Nvidia's RTX 40-series lineup screws gamers on a budget

In an age where the cost of living often exceeds people's salaries, for many users, investing more than $500 in a card for playing PC games is both excessive and unviable. Even a mid range card runs a similar price to an entire PlayStation 5, so it’s not surprising that a large proportion of people aren’t willing to spend outrageous amounts of cash on such an investment. 

To say that reviews of the RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti haven’t been glowing would be an understatement. Gamers Nexus called the 4060 Ti a “waste of sand”, with many people condemning the cards for their use of only 8 GB of VRAM and a paltry 128 bit bus width. A significant downgrade on Nvidia’s previous generation cards. The term “future proof” is laughable when applied to the tech industry, but these cards aren’t even "now proof". Particularly when compared to the outgoing 30 series which often perform just as well, (admittedly with a higher power budget).

So if the 4070 (available on Amazon*) at just over $500 is the starting price for a card that offers a good price to performance ratio, what is Nvidia saying about those customers that can’t afford, or don’t want to spend that much money on a graphics card?

If the pricing of the 4060 and 4060 Ti is anything to go by it’s a massive middle finger. The 4060 series starts at $300 and only goes up from there. Don’t forget this is for a hobbled card that many people equate to an RTX 4050. A card that can be had for a little over $220 for the previous generation. Nvidia might try to sell you on DLSS 3 or frame generation, but let's be honest; this practice equates to overclocking the speedometer in your car and charging you extra for it because it now goes “faster”. The perception of performance is not the same as actual performance.

A 4060 or 4060 Ti might be reasonable for 1080p gaming today, but the longevity of these cards is limited at best, even if they were being offered at reasonable prices. As they stand at the moment these cards are a scam hidden behind AI branding and price increases that promise performance that doesn’t actually exist.

So what should the budget conscious gamer do? In an ideal world we would show Nvidia how upset we are by vetoing their products. Buy a 30 series card second hand or go pure rasterization and switch to AMD (hopefully they'll eventually catch up in ray tracing performance). As it stands, by buying Nvidia’s current products we are inadvertently validating their pricing.

But perhaps the bigger question we should be asking is whether paying $500 to get “value” is reasonable. Especially when the total cost of all the other components in many PC setups equates to a similar amount. If the Steam Deck has done anything, it’s shown that you don’t need to spend this much on a dedicated GPU to enjoy PC gaming.