In what has come as quite a surprise, Nvidia has just announced its series of GeForce RTX 5050 GPUs for laptops and desktop graphics cards. Although we knew the laptops were coming, we didn’t expect to get an announcement on the latter for some time and maybe a bit more of a heads up.
RTX 5050
The new RTX 5050 boasts impressive performance despite having fewer CUDA cores than the RTX 4060. NVIDIA claims it’s up to 60% faster than the RTX 3050 in traditional rasterisation and an astounding four times faster with DLSS 4. With 2,560 cores and a 2.57 GHz boost clock, it achieves a peak FP32 throughput of 13.16 TFLOPS, about 13% less than an RTX 4060. Unlike the RTX 5060, the RTX 5050 uses GDDR6 memory, though clocked higher than that found in the RTX 4060.
| RTX 5050 | RTX 5060 | RTX 4060 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cores | 2560 | 3840 | 3072 |
| L2 cache | 32 MB? | 32 MB | 24 MB |
| Base clock | 2.31 GHz | 2.28 GHz | 1.83 GHz |
| Boost clock | 2.57 GHz | 2.50 GHz | 2.46 GHz |
| Memory bus width | 128-bits | 128-bits | 128-bits |
| VRAM | 8 GB GDDR6 | 8 GB GDDR7 | 8 GB GDDR6 |
| VRAM bandwidth | 320 GB/s | 448 GB/s | 272 GB/s |
| TGP | 130 W | 145 W | 115 W |
| MSRP | $249 | $299 | $299 |
In essence, you’re getting a new graphics card that’s slower than its previous-generation counterpart, yet aims to compensate with enhanced upscaling and frame generation. While DLSS 4 and its Multi Frame Generation are impressive, do you think that the RTX 5050 justifies its $249 price tag?
8GB VRAM, Again?
With Nvidia basically just dropping this into the market, clearly, expectations aren’t that high for it. It’s a cheap card, with not enough VRAM for most modern gamers, but for the budget market, I’m sure it’ll have some appeal. As we saw in the video below the 8GB 5060 really struggled.
In the next video, the 16GB version of the 5060 saw a massive performance boost. I’m guessing, it’ll be largely the same issue with the less powerful 5050.
