NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 vs. AMD Radeon RX 7600 Linux Gaming Performance

This week NVIDIA and their AIB partners began shipping the GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card with pricing starting out at $299 USD. Like the recently-launched Radeon RX 7600, the RTX 4060 is geared mostly for 1080p gaming but how does it compare against the RX 7600 that is priced starting at $249? Here are some initial Linux gaming benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 4060 against the Radeon RX 7600.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 features 8GB of GDDR6 video memory on a 128-bit interface, 3072 CUDA cores, a 1.83GHz base clock, and 2.56GHz boost clock. This Ada Lovelace graphics card continues supporting NVIDIA DLSS 3, PCI Express 4.0, and all the rest of the features in common with the GeForce RTX 40 line-up.

The GeForce RTX 4060 features three DisplayPort connections and one HDMI port while being able to drive 4K @ 240Hz or 8K @ 60Hz when using Display Stream Compression (DSC).

NVIDIA has yet to release a new Linux graphics driver this week to officially advertise the GeForce RTX 4060 support, but the latest NVIDIA R535 Linux driver does in fact work with the RTX 4060.

Unfortunately this initial Linux benchmarking is a day late and limited for now to the GeForce RTX 4060 vs. Radeon RX 7600. NVIDIA has sadly not been sampling Phoronix much recently for Linux graphics card testing and did not supply any RTX 4060 hardware or briefings in advance. Given the popularity of the sub-$300 graphics card space and with the xx60 level graphics cards, I ended up buying a GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card on launch day in order to deliver Linux metrics... (So if you enjoy said NVIDIA Linux graphics testing, consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a tip, or at least disabling any ad-blocker...) I'm in the process of re-testing my other available graphics cards on the latest NVIDIA/AMD Linux drivers and in the next week should have up a much larger graphics card comparison like usual when typically seeded in advance.

The graphics card I ended up buying was the MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4060 8GB as one of the few available in-stock on Thursday's launch day and at the $299 base price point. The MSI Ventus RTX 4060 features two fans and is otherwise a fairly typical RTX 4060 without any extra bells and whistles.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4060 worked fine with the NVIDIA 535.54.03 driver that debuted earlier this month. Presumably though NVIDIA will issue a new R535 stable point release soon to officially advertise the GeForce RTX 4060 support on Linux. Over on the AMD side was using Linux 6.4 with the latest Mesa 23.1 stable packages.

At this point there is no viable fully open-source driver support for the RTX 4060 until Nouveau gets its GSP firmware support mainlined in the future and ideally then able to deliver semi-decent performance with proper re-clocking. The NVK open-source Vulkan driver is also a ways from being ready for handling modern Steam Play or native games. So long story short, for recent generations of the NVIDIA driver you are basically left with just the proprietary driver stack and then the option of using their default closed-source kernel driver or their open-source kernel-only driver with closed-source user-space software stack.

So let's move on with this first look at the GeForce RTX 4060 comparison under Linux and how it's looking against the Radeon RX 7600 while the much larger comparison will be published next week for Linux gaming as well as Linux GPU compute performance.