GeForce RTX 4060Ti is a pointless product and here’s why

So, this won’t be my typical Angry Rant exactly, but I talked with someone in some news comment section about RTX 4060Ti and realized how pointless this product really is and wanted to spill it out here on my blog…

Think about it. NVIDIA released RTX 4060Ti almost 3 years after RTX 3060Ti. Performance metrics wise, it performs basically the same as RTX 3060Ti with slightly better power efficiency. Sure, it has DLSS3 Frame Generation thing, but hardly any game supports that and you’re buying something on what it offers NOW, not what it might offer in the future. DLSS upscaling and Frame Generation is something you should look at as “nice to have”, but not something I’d base my purchase on. On top of that, Frame Generation won’t appear in old games that are not actively supported by devs so you’re not gaining anything there either. You need raw horsepower to improve that and RTX 4060Ti just doesn’t have it.

So, lets look at who is being targeted with RTX 4060Ti, what kind of customer are they targeting with it. If things were normal, new generations always brought generational general performance improvements. This way RTX 4060Ti would appeal to existing users of RTX 3060Ti, RTX 2060 Super, GTX 1650 as well as GTX 1060. If RTX 4060Ti was at least 25% faster than RTX 3060Ti and also more power efficient and also offer Frame Generation tech, I’d actually be like, alright, it’s expensive, but at least it has some substance. It’s faster and also more efficient. If you want to upgrade, why not. But that’s not the case, RTX 4060Ti is performing basically the same as RTX 3060Ti. People raving about power efficiency, why? Who gives a shit? Power efficiency matters when you gain performance out of it. What good is 100W lower power consumption when you don’t gain any framerate out of it? Power consumption doesn’t run your games and if games still run like crap, what’s the point? I don’t get it. This would be a good point if we were talking about a smartphone with finite battery life. This is a desktop card. Performance is all it matters, within certain power envelope of course, but even RTX 3060Ti wasn’t some insane power hungry card. And if you worry about power bill so hard, then you’re in a wrong hobby. That’s like being a petrolhead and worrying about every single cent you spend on petrol. That’s just terrible mentality to have. Performance is the top metric you should care about with graphic cards. It’s what will give you good gaming experience and elevate the value of the game, either through smoothness of play or eye candy you can turn on. Power efficiency gives you none.

Ok, so now we’ve established that RTX 4060Ti is pointless if you already own RTX 3060Ti. So, lets look further down the product stack of ownership if it makes sense there. You’re user with RTX 2060 or even GTX 1650 or GTX 1060 in 2023. If you haven’t bought RTX 3060Ti almost 3 years ago when it was released, why exactly would you buy the same thing 3 years later (now) with just slightly better power efficiency and nothing else? Because that’s what RTX 4060Ti is. Buying RTX 4060Ti wouldn’t give you any performance advantage over what you decided to skip 3 years ago. So, why do it now? It just makes no god damn sense. Some people said RTX 4060Ti would make sense if it was cheaper. But I say, why? How? RTX 4060Ti doesn’t make ANY sense at ANY price point because it doesn’t bring any performance increase over 3 years old product you’ve decided wasn’t worth buying back then. So, why buy same thing, but just slightly more power efficient, now? You’ll pay full fat price for it, but your games won’t gain any framerate compared to 3 years ago. Doesn’t that make RTX 4060Ti the most stupid product release in a really long time? It does.

You may ask why I’m only talking about RTX 4060Ti all this time and not really mentioning Radeon RX 7600 much? Frankly, it’s in similar position. They did elevate performance a bit relative to old gen where RX 7600 is quite comfortably faster even over RX 6650XT, which is the refreshed highest mid end from AMD and comparing it to actual direct predecessor, the RX 6600 would make even larger gap, so that’s great, but the issue is, they didn’t step up the performance game enough to compete with NVIDIA’s offerings from 3 years ago. Which makes me wonder, why bother either? That’s the sad reality. It’s cheaper, but then again, so is RX 6650XT. And so is RTX 3060Ti. It’s just such terrible time to make upgrades and unless you absolutely have to, just don’t. It’s post COVID stagnation bullshit and I hate it. Not buying current gen should send a message to both AMD and NVIDIA. I just worry NVIDIA won’t give two shits about it, because their corporate compute side is booming so hard with all that “NVIDIA in the trillion dollar club” and rise in whole Ai fuckery, I see nothing good for the future of PC gaming. Mark my words.

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus crashing on NVIDIA graphic cards

I’ve revisited this game after many years because I realized I haven’t finished it somehow. Well, since I’m clearing my backlog of games, why not finish it up. Until I got a repeating crashing of the game the moment I’ve entered the game. It never crashed in menus and if I didn’t move mouse in-game, it could run just fine which was weird, but the moment I moved the mouse, it crashed.

I couldn’t really diagnose it because all I got was a sudden freeze of the game with a Windows dialog “ding” sound. Ctrl+Alt+Del and invoking Task Manager and I could see error message saying “Could not write crash dump” (this isn’t the actual error, it’s just a symptom of game being unable to write a crash dump on the error it just experienced) and all the Windows Error logs only state unspecified error in NewColossus_x64vk.exe and that was it.

Digging online I could find bunch of “solutions” that didn’t really work at all as game kept crashing no matter what. So I went with ALL settings OFF as that seemed to work, but it looked rubbish so I kept gradually enabling the settings. Basically I could enable it all until I enabled “Deferred Rendering” and the game instantly crashed again. For some reason this game really doesn’t like using Deferred Rendering method on GeForce RTX 3080 even with currently latest 532.03 drivers. Or with these in particular. Not in mood to downgrade drivers anyway.

SOLUTION

So, make sure “Deferred Rendering” is disabled in Advanced settings and it should work.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060Ti is a massive joke and you should avoid it

So, NVIDIA just launched GeForce RTX 4060Ti graphic card. They officially launched 3 models at following MSRP prices which will be gradually released from this point after RTX 4060Ti 8GB model:

• RTX 4060 8GB ($300)
• RTX 4060Ti 8GB ($400)
• RTX 4060Ti 16GB ($500)

The way NVIDIA positioned these models is that you’re heavily steered towards the 500 bucks model because the non-Ti model is just pathetic and has memory problem because a lot of games are showing issues with cards that only have 8GB of VRAM and that’s at only 1080p! In year 2023! Imagine how it’ll fare 2, 3 or more years in the future? Remember, mid range cards buyers don’t swap them every year or two, they hold them for much longer. So, going with Ti model solves nothing, you have to go to Ti 16GB model. For fucking 500 bucks. FIVE HUNDRED for a mid range card that has real world performance advantage over last generation card released almost 3 years ago basically within margin of error. I shit you not, RTX 4060Ti is just single digit percent better than RTX 3060Ti. And percent numbers are always huge and when you translate them into framerate it’s often just 3 or 5 frames per second difference. So, basically margin of error.

And reason for such lackluster showcase is the fact that NVIDIA cut down RTX 4060 so heavily on all ends it basically demolished any performance advantages of newer core architecture based on Ada Lovelace compared to Ampere architecture powering RTX 3000 series.

First they gave zero VRAM upgrade and it’s stuck at 8GB. Like mentioned, there are games that already saturate that at only 1080p. Then they heavily cut down the memory bus from 256bit found on RTX 3060Ti to just 128bit on RTX 4060Ti. NVIDIA’s excuse was increasing L2 cache within GPU core from 4MB to 32MB, but thing with caches is, they only work under ideal conditions. And when you have ideal conditions, it works beautifully, but when it doesn’t, you’re basically running at half a memory bus width and that is pretty severe downgrade.

To add insult to injury, NVIDIA also cut down PCIe bus width too. Instead of running at full x16 rate, PCIe bus only runs at 8x rate. That in itself isn’t an issue on modern PCIe 4.0 slot motherboard, but imagine if you have older system you’re upgrading with only PCIe 3.0 or even 2.0 ? That means PCIe slot runs way way slower. And one may say, you don’t need so much bandwidth on the slot anyway with mid end graphic card, but there is the problem, those 8GB VRAM is not enough and when game can’t fit resources on onboard memory of graphic card, it’ll spill it over PCIe bus into system memory.

Death by a thousand cuts

It may all sound insignificant on the surface, but when you lose a percent here and percent there on bunch of levels, you’re suddenly losing a lot of performance in the end, so much in fact that all the architectural advantages of Ada Lovelace on RTX 4060Ti are entirely negated to a point it’s basically as fast as RTX 3060Ti from years ago because NVIDIA just cut it down so hard. And don’t get me started with Resizable bar (ReBAR), if your system doesn’t support it, too little memory, cut down memory bus and cut down PCIe slot and it’ll just get even worse in this situation.

Did all this cutting of features away bring users any advantages? No, because the damn thing is as fast as RTX 3060Ti in the end, yet still costs the same (or more for 16GB model). You know what it did tho? It increased PROFIT MARGINS for NVIDIA. More VRAM costs money. Memory costs in peanuts for end users these days and for company buying in bulk with heavy discounts, even less. All straight into NVIDIA pocket when you pay $100 more for pathetic 8GB extra and also for the fact NVIDIA doesn’t give you more as standard. Smaller bus width, the wider the memory interface, it costs more because the GPU core needs more connections to the memory, costing more to manufacture in the end. Since NVIDIA cut it down, the difference goes into their pockets, because you as end user sure as hell aren’t benefiting from it. Cut down PCIe slot rate? Same story. Less complexity, less work, more goes into NVIDIA’s pockets. All the cuts weren’t done to make card cheaper for end user, all the cuts were done to ramp up profits for NVIDIA. Greedy bastards.

Are there even any benefits found on RTX 4060Ti ?

Only real benefit of RTX 4060Ti is slightly better power efficiency, AV1 encoder and decoder and DLSS3 which NVIDIA so desperately shills on all ends showcasing it how much better performance it makes, by showing some bullshit X times better graphs, entirely ignoring the fact that a) DLSS3 isn’t really supported in many games so they are selling performance advantage on premise of future updates of games supporting it b) ignoring the fact that inserting fake frames doesn’t make performance better. It makes smoother motion, but adding extra latency and visual artefacting. But they are just selling it as MOAR FRAMES PER SECOND and showing it in graphs with mega differences in framerate as instant winner over RTX 3000 series which don’t support frame generation despite having hardware support for it (optical flow which is supported since Turing architecture as far as I’ve checked).

Conclusion

If you already have RTX 3060Ti card, RTX 4060Ti is absolutely to be avoided. You’ll not be gaining anything unless hardware AV1 support is your absolute requirement. Everything else, including DLSS3 Frame Generation are all worthless benefits. You buy things on what they offer NOW, not on what they may offer in the future. DLSS performance gains are “nice to have”, because if card performs well now “as is”, slapping DLSS on it just means it’ll perform even better. If card performs the same as last generation from years ago and only advantage is “promised” performance gain with fake frames by using DLSS3, do you really want that? For full price? Yeah, I think not. Currently only few games support it and most existing games will never get support unless they are actively being developed by dedicated developers who are into this stuff. Most aren’t and never add such stuff to old games.

And even if you’re running something like RTX 2060, RTX 2060 Super or even older GTX 1600 or GTX 1650 or equivalent Radeon RX 480/570/580/590, I wouldn’t just rush to buy RTX 4060Ti either. AMD’s offerings are just around the corner with new RX 7600 cards and also price adjustments of older generations like RX 6650 XT or even RX 6700 series. Because currently, AMD’s offerings are neck on neck, they just have slight price disadvantage. But you can be sure AMD will adjust them accordingly pretty soon. And AMD also has FSR which is similar to DLSS. It has similar benefits and issues and it also falls into “nice to have” category, but I wouldn’t base my purchase on it either. And lastly, Intel’s ARC cards are pretty aggressive price wise and Intel made quite a lot of improvements to them.

My advice, don’t rush for RTX 4060Ti and wait for what AMD has to say. And then wait a bit for price adjustments depending on how RX 7600 will perform. You can still buy RTX 4060Ti then if numbers won’t be favorable to AMD. I personally think NVIDIA chased profits so hard by cutting things away they entirely fucked up this card that could otherwise be amazing if it had same raw specs as RTX 3060Ti, but with all the benefits of Ada Lovelace architecture. Same class of every new generation always brought pretty significant performance gains where now, it’s literally stagnating on same level as almost 3 years old card. That’s just greedy and bad. And this is the class of card that will be sold the most to the masses. All other higher models had gains, but not 60 series. Pathetic NVIDIA, really pathetic.

Fuck off with anti-piracy protection in games

Just installed Chronicles of Riddick Dark Athena on Steam after having it in my backlog for years. Finally decided to give it a go after completing Dishonored series and I liked the original Chronicles of Riddick, so what good way to continue stealthy action with this one. Even wanted to replay the original since they remastered it with newer Dark Athena’s engine.

Finally click the game to run it, and then this motherfucker comes up…

It’s a motherfucking Tages protection bullshit driver. Ok, what the fuck? Went to Steam to check what’s up if there are any comments on it or shit review bombs for this. Nope. The game isn’t even listed there anymore. Gee, thanks for releasing game with bullshit protection driver and then removing it from the game store without first fixing it first. Fuck you, fuck you all who do this shit. Now I’ll have to find motherfucking crack to pirate a game I own because I fucking bought it. Haven’t looked for a fucking crack for like 15 years and here we fucking are now in 2023. Where do I even look for fucking cracks these days…

This is the exact same bullshit I’ve been experiencing for years when WindowsXP was released. All the legit owned games that had SecuROM and SafeDisc protection baked into game discs simply refused to work because dumb protection driver couldn’t even work in Windows XP. This is some AAA grade assholery. This is why everyone hates this protection bullshit. Pirates get them cracked eventually one way or the other. All you do is fucking inconvenience and annoy users who actually fucking buy your motherfucking shit. Ugh. Fuck.

Dead Island 2 is Epic Games exclusive. Fuck you Epic.

Just finished Dead Island 1 and after hearing sequel wasn’t made by Techland, I was a bit excited, because this would mean no typical Techland bullshit in the game. Until I got a slap in the face with electrified bat, realizing it’s Epic Games exclusive and you can only buy it on Epic Games store. HELL NO! Uh oh we care about gamers and competition and yadiyadiya says Epic on every fucking occasion! Fuck you Epic. You fuckers constantly bitch how competition is unfair and how you so deeply care about gamers and then you always do this FUUUUUCK YOU “U” turn with these bullshit exclusives. Now I’ll have to wait how many fucking months for this thing to come out on Steam or god forbid GOG? It’ll be so long I’ll forget about it just like I did about Metro Exodus, another dumbass Epic exclusive that I forgot about and never played it afterwards and probably never will because this exclusivity shit annoyed me so much. I just don’t want to buy or use shit Epic launcher. It’s shit like this why no one likes Epic Games and their stupid launcher and it’s why I call everything Tim Sweeney says a complete bullshit lie. I respect him for developing excellent Unreal Engine, but he’s an absolute and complete ass when it comes to business side of things.

Kaspersky, fix the stupid Cloud Free installer already

Ok Kaspersky, what the fuck is going on with your shit?! Kaspersky Cloud Free installer (for EU anyways) ALWAYS downloads some ancient version from 2021 and then you ALWAYS have to wait for days and weeks for it to fucking auto update to latest version. When it fucking wills, not when I’m installing the fucking thing. WHY?! Whole point of web installer is that you always download the latest version, so you don’t double download the god damn app and waste bandwidth and further annoy user. There are no latest offline installers and their web installer is this dumbass shit with old version. Fucking fix it already, for fucks sake. Every time I want to try Kaspersky again I have to deal with this shit and in the end I also always just give up and install Avast back. Everyone seems to hate Avast because of their single privacy flop from years ago, but they also seem to be the only ones who do their shit properly, be it offering offline installers, online installer that actually downloads latest version every single time you’re using the web installer, fucking Ransomware Shield (which Microsoft still hasn’t figured out after literal years and their dumbass useless whitelist), despite occasional issues or small bugs, shit just works.

How fucking hard is it for installer to actually download your latest version? God damn. I’d expect this from some garage company, not from Kaspersky.

I guess I’m back to Avast until Kaspersky fixes this shit…

Why is audio mastering in movies and series so shit?

Not long ago Amazon announced they released some magic Ai thing to auto adjust volume of stuff in movies and series because speech is often too quiet and effects like explosions are way too loud. It’s so bad you have to constantly adjust volume or use subtitles so you even know what the fuck is going on because you can’t understand their fucking whispering.

And that made me wonder, why? Just why someone needs to create some “Ai” feature to adjust that, when it’s a god damn job of audio masters to fucking do their god damn job. But for some reason, this dumb volume levels idiocy is the norm nowadays in video content. It’s like everyone forgot how to properly master audio. If source is done properly, there is no need for such stuff and it just works correctly on any device.

How did we get to this point and why? I just don’t get it.

Microsoft, fix the stupid broken Storage Sense in Windows 11

Ok Microsoft, tell me how you can have a feature around for literal fucking years and it’s still broken to a point it’s literally fucking not working at all? Like for example StorageSense. Those 4MB of cleaned stuff is highly questionable and if files in Recycle Bin older than 30 days are deleted automatically, then why the fuck I still have files in it that were deleted back in November 2022. Fucking 4 months ago? But hey, that stupid shit you keep removing and adding back months later is so fucking important. Or moving of taskbar around the screen edges. Windows 98 had that shit. How about you first fix your existing shit and stop removing crap we had 30 years ago? For fucks sake. What an absolute dump. With how much tracking and idiocy is in Windows, it should be fucking free because it’s in worse than BETA state for years. WTF?!

Anti-fraud service Eye4Fraud hacked

Apparently this service got hacked per recent news. What’s the biggest irony is that they were suppose to keep customers safe from fraud and now, what I can only assume, their pure incompetence resulted in leak of over 16 million customer accounts information. This includes customer e-mails, physical addresses, phone numbers, partial credit card numbers and more.

More can be read here:

https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#Eye4Fraud

Adding extra insult to injury, users can’t do anything about it because they are some 3rd party no one asked to collect user data got all the user data and no one even knows what websites use this service behind the scenes. You may get a notification that your personal information was compromised in a security leak, but you pretty much can’t do anything about it because some unrelated 3rd party fucked up. Slow clap Eye4Fraud.  You may just as well go bankrupt at this point, given that you failed at very thing you exist for…

SkyShowtime and how all streaming can go fuck itself

I’ve been seeing billboards about SkyShowtime because this service apparently came to my country recently. Being fed up with lack of content on Netflix and Disney+, I’ve decided to check it out. Wow, so there is CSI on it. I loved that show, but due to life things, I missed bunch of episodes. I’d love to binge watch all of CSI episodes from very beginning to its very end. And then they only list episodes from like season 12 and upwards. Are you fucking kidding me? Ok, maybe I’ll check Law & Order: SVU, because I had same limited ability to see all episodes back in the day. Season 17 and upwards only? Oh fuuuuuuck you. WHY?! At this point I’m like, fine, I’m just gonna watch Halo series. Right? Like, it’s a new show and it starts from Season 1 Episode 1 because there’s just one fucking season so far. Click the thing on my laptop running Firefox on Linux (with that DRM shit enabled) and the service is whining how my current system isn’t compatible with SkyShowtime. Are you fucking kidding me?

I was ready to check some stuff and be subscribed for a month or two. But no, you utter fucks literally encourage piracy. Guess what, all pirate sites will happily serve me entire fucking CSI from Episode 1 to its final one for as long as there are some seeds to serve that shit to me. Same for Law & Order. And I won’t have any issues playing fucking Halo on whatever the fuck system I’ll desire. How in fuck are these companies worldwide success with such fucking imbecile incompetent behavior? Like fuuuuuuuuuck you all. You want to go legit as consumer and not pirate shit just to deal with more dumb inconvenient bullshit. If I just pirated the fucking content, I’d have none of these problems and inconveniences. How the fuck does this make any kind of sense?

This is why I haven’t pirated a single game for over 15 fucking years. Because I never had to deal with such utterly dumb bullshit. I give them money, they give me game. It’s so easy and convenient I literally can’t be bothered chasing game ISO image and then dig for the right crack that works with certain version of the game. In this case, piracy is inconvenient and I can’t be bothered with it. Meanwhile all the streaming services are ramming head into wall with this inconvenient fuckery that just makes you want to just download shit from somewhere and watch it in fucking peace. Like, come on, is this 1995 or 2023 ? I don’t remember being so inconvenienced by fucking VHS tapes and we had to go to a nearby town to fucking rent them back in the 90’s. You’d think we’ve progressed somewhere in this consumer obsessed world run by money, but nope. Nothing fucking changed in the movie industry. In fact it just got worse from the looks of it.

EDIT:

I’ve now also tried spoofing user agent in browser and the fucking thing wouldn’t work with ANYTHING. Setting it as Windows with ANY browser agent, be it Edge, Chrome or whatever, the dumb SkyShowtime keeps whining about unsupported device. You fucking pile of wanking dicks. WHY?! Why the fuck is watching of movies not allowed in Firefox on fucking Linux? You have the fucking DRM module there for this fucking purpose you utter fucking morons. But who the fuck cares, I’ll just go on PirateBay and watch fucking Halo in peace on my fucking Linux laptop without your stupid ass whining. Congrats, you solved piracy by blocking Linux users!