Skip to main content

Despite mixed reviews, the RTX 4060 is moving the needle for Nvidia

Nvidia has been taking a beating lately with its graphics cards, at least if you believe the reviews. On the financial side, however, Nvidia is still bringing in the cash with its controversial RTX 4060 family.

The company released its earnings for the second quarter of fiscal 2024 (or, in real life, the third quarter of 2023). Unsurprisingly, Nvidia brought in a ton of money overall — a new record at $13.51 billion, which is 101% higher than a year ago, largely due to the AI boom. What’s surprising is that Nvidia’s gaming revenue is up, too.

Logo on the RTX 4060 Ti graphics card.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

It made $2.49 billion in gaming revenue over the last quarter. That’s not quite the peak for Nvidia at the height of the GPU shortage — in November 2021, the company reported $3.22 billion — but it’s close. For instance, in the first quarter of fiscal 2022 (second quarter of real 2021), Nvidia reported $2.76 billion in gaming revenue.

Recommended Videos

Since the GPU shortage, Nvidia (along with AMD and Intel) have seen a steady drop in income from CPUs and GPUs while dealing with the fallout from the pandemic. It isn’t surprising to see Nvidia claw some of that money back, but it comes on the back of three GPUs that weren’t received well.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

In its earnings press release, Nvidia highlights its RTX 4060 family of graphics cards, all of which have been met with some controversy. The RTX 4060 Ti takes center stage, with most reviewers saying it’s too expensive for the performance it offers (read our own RTX 4060 Ti review for our full thoughts). The 16GB RTX 4060 Ti stirred up even more controversy, costing $500 and only offering a benefit over the base model in select games.

The RTX 4060 Ti was almost universally panned, but it’s fair to say the RTX 4060’s reception was mixed. In our RTX 4060 review, we said “it’s not a bad graphics card, just not a particularly good one, and certainly one that’s hard to recommend given the wide swath of last-gen options.”

Despite the reception, the RTX 4060 family seems to be moving the needle for Nvidia. The company says its gaming revenue is up 22% compared to the last year.

That still pales in comparison to the money brought in from the AI boom, though. The company reported $10.32 billion in its data center business, which is 171% higher than it was a year ago.

Jacob Roach
Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
Bad news for AMD? Nvidia might fast-track the RTX 50-series
Two RTX 4060 cards side by side

Things are finally about to start heating up for some of the best graphics cards. Although we're still in the dark about final release dates, both AMD and Nvidia are said to be launching new GPUs in the first quarter of 2025. However, a new leak tells us that Nvidia might try out a different approach with the RTX 50-series, and that's bound to put some pressure on AMD at the worst possible time.

What's new? We've already heard that Nvidia is likely to announce the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080 at CES 2025, with its CEO Jensen Huang scheduled to hold a keynote during the event. However, the release dates for the rest of the lineup remained a mystery. Now, a previously reliable source sheds some light on the matter with potential details about the planned launch dates for the RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5060, and RTX 5060 Ti.

Read more
25 years ago, Nvidia changed PCs forever
The GeForce 256 sitting next to a Half Life box.

Twenty-five years ago, Nvidia released the GeForce 256 and changed the face of PCs forever. It wasn't the first graphics card produced by Nvidia -- it was actually the sixth -- but it was the first that really put gaming at the center of Nvidia's lineup with GeForce branding, and it's the device that Nvidia coined the term "GPU" with.

Nvidia is celebrating the anniversary of the release, and rightfully so. We've come an unbelievable way from the GeForce 256 up to the RTX 4090, but Nvidia's first GPU wasn't met with much enthusiasm. The original release, which lines up with today's date, was for the GeForce 256 SDR, or single data rate. Later in 1999, Nvidia followed up with the GeForce 256 DDR, or dual data rate.

Read more
Nvidia may give the RTX 5080 a sweet consolation prize
The back of the Nvidia RTX 4080 Super graphics card.

Nvidia's best graphics cards are due for an update, and it seems that the RTX 5080 might get an unexpected boost with faster GDDR7 memory than even the flagship RTX 5090. That might be its sole consolation prize, though, because the gap between the two may turn out to be even bigger than in this generation.

First, the good news. Wccftech cites its own sources as it reports that the RTX 5080 will get 32Gbps memory modules from the get-go -- a significant upgrade over the RTX 5090 with its 28Gbps. The best part is that such a memory upgrade would bring the RTX 5080 to a whopping 1TB/s of total bandwidth, marking a huge improvement over the RTX 4080 Super, which maxes out at 736GB/s.

Read more