2023 continues to be something of a Bad Year for PC gaming, with Alex recently returning to Jedi Survivor to see if the game's long-standing shader compilation stutters have been fixed and performance has been improved. That's the first news topic on this week's DF Direct show, with Alex concluding that while frame-rates have climbed ever higher after subsequent patches, the core stutter issue has not been solved - and that hitching detracts from the Metroidvania-esque joy of discovering new areas. It's a shame then, but a topic that we've covered before in some detail - so the focus of this blog will be on another PC gaming topic covered by Alex, John and Rich in this week's episode: the recent RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti announcement.
In short, it's clear from the response to our article announcing the cards and similar discussions elsewhere that a lot of people are a bit annoyed by what Nvidia revealed. It's great to see a 3060 Ti successor, given that card's price/performance ratio in the last generation, and it's nice to have a 16GB version of the card... but with that 16GB model coming two months after the vanilla 8GB card and costing $100 more, it feels like neither offers a brilliant value proposition.
The 8GB model matches the price of the 3060 Ti and 2060 Super, at $399, yet that same 8GB of VRAM is feeling a bit underpowered in 2023 - especially given the recent PC releases that have suffered mightily on 8GB cards. It is possible to work around that with judicious settings choices, but that's not where you want to be right after buying a shiny new graphics card - even a mid-range one!