We haven’t heard much via the grapevine regarding Nvidia’s RTX 4060 GPU until today, when a comprehensive rumour about the graphics card finally arrived, however we recommend taking some of the claims with a grain of salt.

This was brought to light by @harukaze5719, a regular leaker of hardware information on Twitter. It supposedly comes from the Gaming Desktop Product Planning Manager for Lenovo in China, a certain ‘Wolstame,’ who discusses the RTX 4060’s performance and release date on the social networking site Weibo.

And if you thought this cheaper Lovelace GPU was on the horizon, you’d be wrong, albeit the dearth of rumours surrounding the graphics card at this point sort of speaks for itself.

Wolstame claims the RTX 4060 will be released on “618,” the date of a huge Chinese shopping holiday in 2023.

Wolstame makes it clear that the performance rumours are based on speculation, but they say we may anticipate results comparable to the RTX 3070. While this portion of the rumour makes sense, the part about the 4060 being 20% faster than the RTX 3060 is pretty puzzling, as the 3060 is much slower than the 4070. (apply a tonne of extra seasoning, in other words).

The power need is expected to be less than the RTX 3060, maybe as low as 150W.

According to the leaker, the RTX 4060 will cost around the same as the RTX 3060 Ti (some of the phrasing and translation leaves room for doubt).

The RTX 3060 Ti is advertised with an MSRP of 399 in the United States (or £369 in the United Kingdom) if we’re talking about suggested price.

Nothing reasonable in the works for Lovelace, then?

The most intriguing aspect of this report is the June 2023 release date, which would likely include not just the Chinese market but also the rest of the world.

Those anticipating an RTX 4060 sooner may be dismayed to learn that it won’t be available until May. If the story about the RTX 4070 Ti being the previously “unlaunched” RTX 4080 12GB is correct, then it seems like we’ll be stuck with the high-end RTX 4080 and 4090 for the time being.

We are not anticipating the RTX 4070 Ti to be particularly cheap, especially in light of the hefty price tags attached to the RTX 4080 series. Therefore, it does not look like cheap Lovelace GPUs are in the horizon; the only glimmer of light is the impending release of a vanilla RTX 4070, which will hopefully be priced more reasonably. For the time being, though, it looks like Nvidia is firmly adopting a ‘layered’ approach we heard speak of a while ago, in which those searching for a cheaper graphics card are simply urged to purchase an RTX 3000 model (since there is still an excess of stock with these).

To be sure, Wolstame recommends this; the leaker is pessimistic about the RTX 4060, so rather than wait a long time for the GPU to appear, Wolstame advocates purchasing an Ampere model (RTX 3080, in fact – though the RTX 3070 is supposedly the performance equivalent of the RTX 4060).

We believe it’s probably much too early to make even broad conclusions about the power of the RTX 4060, given the alleged performance is couched in terms of an absolute estimate and is presented in a confusing manner, as Wolstame seems to be making two separate predictions.

However, it’s important to remember that the RTX 4060 will soon have access to DLSS 3, which will significantly improve its performance in select titles compared to RTX 3000 series cards. (Perhaps Wolstame is also referring to rasterized performance; this isn’t made clear – thus ray tracing improvements for the RTX 4060 may be more considerable than stated.)

For the time being, therefore, let’s take this rumour dump with the scepticism it really deserves; nonetheless, we can’t say we’re shocked to learn that the RTX 4060 might still be a long way off; although, we must confess, we weren’t thinking quite as far ahead as next June. Ultimately, only time can tell.