So, where does this leave us with the RTX 4060? It would be very easy to dismiss this as the RTX 4060 Ti experience scaled back to a lower price tier - and to be fair, all of the benchmarks back up that point of view.
Performance upgrades against the RTX 3060 can be impressive or they can be risible. The variation on a title-by-title basis is extraordinary, just as it was for RTX 4060 Ti. Either way, you're still missing out on the extra 4GB of framebuffer memory that the older product had and any regression in spec from one generation to the next is not great. Meanwhile, the RTX 4060's 8GB of memory puts it into the same class of product as the Intel Arc A750 and Radeon RX 7600, where the price vs performance ratios skew in favour of the cheaper offerings. The thing is, as my recent budget GPU testing revealed, there's no clear winner here. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses.
All of which means that the RTX 4060 joins an incredibly hotly contested market sector, where AMD's RX 7600 seems to have recently received a pricing haircut to $250, which makes it very compelling, especially for rasterisation. Intel's Arc A750 is the same price and can mix it up with the 4060 in RT performance, but falls short in legacy gaming. The RTX 3060? It's the only 12GB game in town at a time when too many games are shipping with poor texture quality management for 8GB GPUs. There is no one product under £299/$299 that delivers everything I think a gamer should have at that price-point.
The arrival of the RTX 4060 does not change that conclusion that much, it simply expands the range of possible areas of strength - because as much as the reduction in memory vs RTX 3060 is frustrating, there's no doubt that the RTX 4060 is generally faster than its predecessor, while DLSS 3 absolutely can be a game-changer in this sector of the market. Meanwhile, if Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive path-tracing is a vision for the future of gaming, right now only the RTX 4060 is going to open up that experience for the budget GPU sector. Especially with the RT optimisation mod in place, seeing a path-traced Cyberpunk 2077 play out at 1080p at 60-90fps was a simply extraordinary feat. The RTX 4060 can do things no other GPU can do, but it's one step away from being the definitive product for its market.