The RTX 4060 and RX 7600 represent two of the most important GPUs on the market today. Both GPUs fill out the extremely popular $250–$300 price bracket that, if we’ve learned anything from Steam’s Hardware Survey, are the most desirable price point for PC gamers. The best graphics cards might range in price from $150 to as much as $1,500 in theory, but far more people are willing to fork over $300 instead of opting for a high-end or extreme performance graphics card. In this faceoff, we'll discover which GPU is the best option.
The Nvidia RTX 4060 provides the lowest entry point into its Ada Lovelace RTX 40-series GPU product stack right now. When it arrived last year, it arrived with a positive twist by being $30 cheaper than the previous generation RTX 3060 12GB. $30 might not seem like much, but it makes the RTX 4060 the first and only RTX 40-series GPU (so far) to undercut its predecessor in price. We commended the RTX 4060's excellent power efficiency, though we weren't as pleased with the regression to a 128-bit bus and 8GB of memory, noting that in practice the GPU feels more like a replacement for the RTX 3050 8GB than it's beefier 3060 sibling.
The AMD RX 7600 is also the lowest SKU in Team Red's product stack. The RX 7600 had a strange launch, as AMD originally priced the GPU at $300, but almost immediately after Nvidia’s RTX 4060 announcement (which included the card’s $299 MSRP), the official launch price dropped to $269 to better compete with Nvidia. It was a necessary price cut as otherwise the matchup would have been decidedly one-sided, and we noted the rather lackluster performance in our review. AMD barely moved the needle in the performance department compared to the prior generation RX 6650 XT, and even now the RX 7600 feels like a glorified RDNA 2 card rather than a true budget-mainstream successor to the RX 6600.
To find out how the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 stack up, we'll look at performance, price, features, technology, software, and power efficiency — in order of generally decreasing importance. Then we'll render a verdict on this mainstream / budget shootout — sadly, both AMD and Nvidia have effectively abandoned the true budget range of dedicated graphics cards this generation.
