Ray Tracing
Being an RTX card, maybe things start looking better in raytracing-based titles. Kicking things off with Alan Wake II, which as a caveat, has got upscaling set to balanced, because even on higher-tiered cards, it’s a necessity. It’s here where the RTX 5050 is looking promising. Not only do we see it moving up our standings, but we also see it scrape past the 60 FPS threshold, coming in at 61 frames per second. But this also means it comes in 5% faster than the RTX 4060. Not a huge uplift, but it’s something, and other titles may see some larger improvements.
Sadly, in Black Myth: Wukong, that’s not the case, and it comes in as the worst-performing RTX card we’ve tested for these results, matching the performance of the RTX 3060 Ti, and falling 2 FPS behind the RTX 4060. The silver lining is that it does come in faster than the RX 9060 XT and even higher-end cards from the last two generations of AMD GPUs, but that’s more a testament as to how bad they were, and not how good this is.
Cyberpunk’s rasterisation performance was pretty good, but enabling raytracing sees that performance plummet, and again, this feels very similar to what the RTX 3050 felt like when that was released. Almost like it should have never been an RTX card, and instead, NVIDIA should have brought back the GTX branding, or just not bothered to release the card at all.
Lastly, in F1 24, we do see the RTX 5050 come in with 61 FPS, which is perfectly fine, but again, sitting at the bottom of our charts, makes it feel mediocre, especially again, when compared to the likes of the RTX 4060. This card should be not only matching its performance, but surpassing it, even if by a small margin, otherwise, this just feels like an RTX 4060 Lite.
