What happened
In late August 2023, AMD set aggressive prices for its last big launches of the GPU generation: the $449 Radeon RX 7700 XT and $499 RX 7800 XT, aimed squarely at Nvidia's $499 GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB and $599 RTX 4070. Days later, and ahead of AMD's September 6 launch, Nvidia quietly cut the 16GB 4060 Ti to $449 — a $50 reduction buried toward the bottom of an email its Brian Burke sent to GPU reviewers. 'Finally, as a reminder, market prices can vary from the original launch MSRPs,' the email read, before pivoting to Nvidia-specific features like DLSS.
The discount only underscored how badly the SKU had landed. Where reviews of the 8GB 4060 Ti were damning-with-faint-praise, the 16GB version was uniformly panned: the GPU was identical to the cheaper 8GB card, the extra memory helped only a handful of games, and the narrow 128-bit memory bus throttled exactly the 1440p and 4K workloads where more RAM should matter — in some 4K games it barely beat the late-2020 RTX 3060 Ti. All for a $100 premium. Nvidia didn't even send out review cards, and outlets reported board partners weren't keen to loan samples either.
Ars Technica's verdict: the price tweak made the card 'marginally more palatable', but a buyer would still likely bypass both 4060 Ti versions for the $299 RTX 4060 or the better $599 RTX 4070. The quiet reprice, conceded only once AMD's cheaper cards were a week away, turned the 16GB 4060 Ti into the cautionary SKU of the RTX 40 lineup.
What it cost
A $50 cut to $449, conceded in a buried line of an email to reviewers, after uniformly negative coverage and no review samples.
Why it happened
The 16GB version paired the same GPU as the 8GB card with a 128-bit bus that couldn't feed the extra memory, so the $100 premium bought almost no performance.
Nvidia's confidence was low enough that it shipped no review samples, and partners reportedly declined loaners — the press noticed.
AMD's $449 RX 7700 XT undercut the card at launch week, forcing a response Nvidia chose to make as invisible as possible.
The reprice was framed as 'market prices can vary' rather than a cut, preserving the launch MSRP in name while conceding it in fact.
The lesson
Charging $100 more for a spec that the architecture can't exploit reads as a tax, and the market reprices it for you — before your competitor does.
Aftermath
As of the September 6, 2023 AMD launch, the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti stood at $449, matching the RX 7700 XT, with Nvidia steering reviewer attention to DLSS frame generation and ray-tracing improvements instead. Ars Technica said it would weigh the new price in its RX 7700 XT/7800 XT reviews, and still expected to recommend bypassing both 4060 Ti versions.
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