Understanding the Role of Memory Capacity and Speed in Video Card Performance: A Detailed Analysis of NVIDIA’s 4060Ti and 4070Ti

Yes, filling is always fast (from the experience of a person), you can fill that 16GB with data in no time, even on a much smaller bus. And there will always be that if you exceed the total capacity you will get visible performance problems. So you want to avoid this at all times.

The speed of the memory plays a different role and has not so much to do with capacity, you want to match the total bandwidth (and this is not just the bus) as closely as possible to the GPU speed, since both are dependent on each other. A 4060Ti with a 96bit bus could bottleneck the GPU to the point of potential loss. But this could be compensated with higher clocked memory. As so often, many more things play a role in the overall performance of a video card, so to say that 96bit is too little is incorrect.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a 4060Ti can function fine with a 96bit bus since this generation is optimized quite differently in that area. You can see that a 4070 with half a bus can already deliver the same performance as a 3080. Larger cache may play a role here.

All this does not alter the fact that when memory overflows there will always be a performance problem, no matter how fast or slow the memory is. And so the 4060ti with 16GB will in some cases be more resistant to certain settings compared to a 4070ti. While the total maximum speed is of course lower, the video card can in some cases outperform the 4070ti and that is certainly a strange choice from nVidia.