NVIDIA’s Mid-Range GPUs See Limited Performance Uplift In Recent Generations
NVIDIA’s Mid-Range GPUs See Limited Performance Uplift In Recent Generations
It’s not just you – despite NVIDIA boasting huge numbers on its flagship products achieving huge performance increases, the trickle-down effect did not happen as everyone expected. As evidenced by ComputerBase’s testing, it turns out the gen-over-gen improvements in recent generations have been rather underwhelming.
Referencing the GTX 1060 – one of the most popular mid-range GPUs in NVIDIA’s history – the German publication put all of its successors, the RTX 2060, RTX 3060, and RTX 4060 for this comparison. According to the numbers observed, the RTX 2060 provides the biggest gen-over-gen leap over its direct predecessor, outperforming the GTX 1060 by 79% on average.
However, the gen-over-gen uplift in subsequent generations is only 17% for the RTX 3060, and 22% for the RTX 4060. Even comparing the RTX 4060 to RTX 2060, the uplift – which is 43% – still fell short of the Turing card managed to achieve over its Pascal counterpart.
As Tom’s Hardware notes, the performance difference between GTX 1060 and RTX 2060 is huge in certain edge cases, with the RTX card achieving a massive 226% uplift on Diablo II: Resurrected and an 86% improvement on DOOM Eternal. In many cases, the RTX card managed to achieve 60FPS, while the GTX card fell significantly behind.
Meanwhile, comparing RTX 3060 and RTX 4060 gets complicated due to VRAM limitations on the newer card. 8GB is hardly anything performant to most modern games, and it shows that RTX 3060 even managed to outperform RTX 4060 with better 1% lows, which translates to fewer stuttering issues.
Pokdepinion: Hopefully this changes with RTX 5060 – but I’m not holding my breath. AI is clearly their bigger priority at the moment.
