Just the other day, we examined NVIDIA’s new RTX 5050, a graphics card positioned to bring the latest generation of performance to the more budget-friendly, mainstream market. Sadly, from our own testing, that just wasn’t the case, unless you were relying on upscaling through the latest DLSS technology with multi-frame generation. One big question, clearly evident from your comments, was why we didn’t test the RTX 3050. So, here we are today, pitting the RTX 3050 against the RTX 5050 across 30 games to determine the generational uplift in both rasterisation and ray tracing-based titles.
RTX 3050 vs. RTX 5050
I want to start with a quick caveat: the reason we didn’t test the RTX 3050 in our initial launch-day coverage was purely down to the timeframe. We received a card from Colourful and were on a tight schedule to get things tested and published. For the most part, we compared the RTX 5050 to AMD’s RX 7600 XT and 9060 XT due to their somewhat similar pricing, as well as older NVIDIA cards from previous generations like the RTX 4060 and RTX 3060 Ti. However, now that we have a little more time, we wanted to take a deeper dive into what is arguably the evolutionary step up, so today it’s all about the RTX 3050 versus the RTX 5050.
Much to NVIDIA’s disappointment, I’m sure, we won’t be looking at multi-frame generation (MFG) or any form of upscaling technology today. Instead, we’ll be focusing purely on rasterisation and ray tracing-based performance across 30 games at three different resolutions, which goes against what they like to see. While we have no illusion that NVIDIA wants us to talk about multi-frame generation and upscaling technology, that will be the focus of a separate feature, which we’ll be looking at shortly, so make sure you check that out once it’s published.
Nvidia
Today, however, is all about pure rasterisation performance and ray tracing because I think it’s safe to say that’s what the general consumer and gamer wants to see, based on comparing like-for-like or “apples to apples” when moving from a 30-series or 40-series NVIDIA-based GPU up to this latest RTX 5050.
