Rumors and retail listings point to the return of actual mid-range GPUs

There are two kinds of GPUs you can buy right now if you want to build or upgrade a gaming PC: affordable but old ones and new but expensive ones. Both Nvidia and AMD have been leaning on older products, sometimes with price cuts, to fill the very large gaps in the middle and low ends of their current lineups. But a slowly building buzz of rumors and leaks suggests things should change before long.

A source speaking to VideoCardz dot com says there are three GeForce RTX 4060-series GPUs coming in the next couple of months, starting with an 8GB version of the 4060 Ti that could be announced as soon as next week and released by the end of the month. A 16GB version of the 4060 Ti and an 8GB version of the 4060 could be announced at the same time but launch at some point in July (Nvidia used the same simultaneous-announcement, staggered-release strategy for the 4090 and 4080 series).

Further Reading

It's not surprising that the 4060 Ti looks like a big step down from the recently released RTX 4070--4,352 CUDA cores instead of 5,888, a 128-bit memory bus instead of 192-bit, 8GB instead of 12GB. But it also looks less-than-promising as a step up from 2020's RTX 3060 Ti, which used a 256-bit memory bus, 4,864 CUDA cores, and the same amount of RAM. Extra cache memory, higher clock speeds, and the updated Ada Lovelace architecture should all make the 4060 Ti faster than the 3060 Ti in the end, but it may not be a huge generational leap.

AMD's new RX 7600 looks like a more straightforward upgrade over the last-generation RX 6600; both cards will reportedly use 8GB of memory on a 128-bit bus, but the 7600 reportedly has 2,048 compute units instead of the 6600's 1,792. This is the only new Radeon card on the radar right now, though--there are no rumors of an RX 7600 XT or any variants with additional RAM. AMD also hasn't released any RX 7700 or 7800-series cards yet; so far, we've seen more integrated GPUs based on the RDNA 3 architecture than dedicated desktop GPUs.

The RX 7600 will reportedly be launched on May 25, a day after the reported launch date for the RTX 4060 Ti. These dates could change, and AMD and Nvidia routinely tweak their plans in response to what the other company is doing.

An interesting wrinkle for both cards, according to VideoCardz, is that they'll use an eight-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface instead of the more-typical 16-lane setup. This won't be a problem for modern systems since eight lanes of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth is well in excess of what mid-range cards need to communicate with the rest of your system. But the interface could be limiting if you drop the cards into an older PCIe 3.0 system--testing from TechPowerUp found that an RX 6600 XT with an eight-lane interface lost a couple of percentage points of performance in a PCIe 3.0 system, and the difference could be more pronounced for faster cards.

VideoCardz didn't publish any pricing information for either the 4060 Ti or the RX 7600. Nvidia launched the 3060 Ti for $399 and the RX 6600 launched for $329, and neither company has been lowering the prices for its next-gen upgrades so far. Similar pricing for the 4060 Ti and RX 7600 is probably a best-case scenario, and we wouldn't be surprised to see small increases.