Nvidia surprise-launches the GeForce RTX 5050 graphics card, starting at $249 for what's basically a slower RTX 4060 with DLSS 4
In a move that caught us somewhat off guard, Nvidia has just announced its series of GeForce RTX 5050 GPUs for laptops and desktop graphics cards. The former was certainly expected, and while the latter has been rumoured for a while, we had expected more of a heads-up about it.
Anyway, so what have we got? Well, something that has fewer CUDA cores than an RTX 4060, but thanks to a higher clock speed and DLSS 4, naturally, Nvidia says the RTX 5050 is up to 60% faster than an RTX 3050... when using DLSS 4.
With 2,560 cores running at the suggested boost clock of 2.57 GHz, the RTX 5050 will have a peak FP32 throughput of 13.16 TFLOPS, roughly 13% lower than an RTX 4060. Unlike its nearest sibling, the RTX 5060, the new GeForce card uses GDDR6 rather than speedy GDDR7, but it's clocked higher than that used for 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 short, what you've really got is a brand new graphics card that's slower than the bottom tier SKU in the previous generation, but has the benefit of better upscaling and frame generation to attempt to make up for it. While DLSS 4 and its Multi Frame Generation are genuinely impressive, you have to ask yourself: Is the RTX 5050 worth $249?
That's Nvidia's price, of course, and you can bet your last cent that there will be overclocked models for add-in board vendors who will charge more for an RTX 5050 with a modicum of overclocking.
I've been using an RTX 4050 laptop for game testing, and it's surprisingly good—certainly better than you'd expect it to be—but its biggest weakness was the 6 GB of VRAM. At least you're getting 8 GB with the RTX 5050. However, even accounting for all of the above, $249 is really too high a price; about $50 too high, to my eyes.
Given that the launch came out of nowhere, don't expect to see reviews straight away, as the cards themselves won't be available until the second half of July. Wait to see what the actual performance is like before throwing down any money.