The Yuzu emulator developers recently gave the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti a critical review, calling it ” serious regression “for emulation due to its limited memory configuration.
In their recent report, the Yuzu development team expressed their dissatisfaction with NVIDIA for seriously degrading emulation capabilities with the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU.
The Yuzu emulator development team has called the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti “a serious regression”.
The release of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti last month drew mixed reviews in terms of value for money compared with older options, and in particular disappointing performance when compared with the RTX 3060 Ti. DLSS 3 and the AV1 encoder remain the card’s strong points, but otherwise performance gains are weak, with a memory bus width of 128 compared with 258 for the previous generation. Incidentally, in our comparison of the best graphics card for you, we still haven’t included the 4060 Ti.
The developers at Yuzu share the same opinion and believe that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti represents a serious step backwards for emulation compared with the previous GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. They point out that the memory configuration chosen by NVIDIA is mediocre and doesn’t provide an optimal emulated gaming experience.
According to the developers, using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti for Switch console emulation will result in slower performance compared to the RTX 3060 Ti due to its narrower 128-bit memory bus. This means that users will have to make do with older Ampere cards or upgrade to high-end GeForce RTX 40 GPUs, which seems to be NVIDIA’s original intention with the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 models.
The RTX 4090 is considered the best choice in the NVIDIA RTX 40 range, while the other cards have been criticized up to now, mainly because of their high prices. By the way, you can find Zelda Tears of the Kingdom running at over 60 fps 4K with an RTX 4090.
Like AMD’s Infinity Cache, NVIDIA has equipped its Ada GPUs with a larger L2 cache. A larger cache is proven to improve performance, but it’s also easy to fill the cache quickly when using resolution scaling. Using 2x upscaling will quickly exhaust cache resources, leaving only the 128-bit memory interface, which is a regression on the previous Ti offering. Here’s the full statement from the Yuzu development team:
” Now to the disappointing news: the RTX 4060 Ti.
We don’t understand the decisions NVIDIA made when it chose the GeForce Ada Lovelace series of products, but there were clearly mistakes. The RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB with its 128-bit memory bus and GDDR VRAM. 6 represents a serious regression for emulation compared to its predecessor, the 256-bit RTX 3060 Ti. By choosing the latest product, you’ll get slower performance for Switch emulation. We have to advise users to stick with Ampere products if possible, or aim for higher-end 4000 series cards if necessary (for DLSS3 or AV1 encoding), which clearly seems to be NVIDIA’s objective.
Ada’s advantage lies in the increased cache size, which significantly improves performance, as RDNA2 has confirmed in the past. However, there is also a silent warning that nobody mentions in the reviews: when the cache is saturated, performance is that of a 128-bit card, and it is very easy to saturate the cache when using resolution scaling. Just multiply performance by 2 and it collapses.
Spending 400 USD on a card with mediocre performance outside of 1x upscaling is, in our opinion, a very bad investment and should be avoided. We hope that the version with 16 GB VRAM will be equipped with GDDR6X, which would increase the available bandwidth and really improve performance for this type of work. “
Yuzu
This is a disappointment for the players who were eagerly awaiting the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and wanted to enjoy emulated games. NVIDIA has its reasons for opting for the 4060 Ti and its current memory configuration, which can be interesting for 1080p games. However, the 128-bit memory bus for a €439 card is a little limited.
So far, we’ve found that this hasn’t been a major problem in most 1080p games, but with the ever-increasing memory requirements for unoptimized PC ports, it could become a major issue. It remains to be seen whether the version of the 4060 Ti with 16 GB VRAM will change this, which would normally have an influence on performance.