You shouldn’t buy the GeForce RTX 5060 today, and Nvidia knows it

Nvidia’s newest (and possibly last) addition to the RTX 50-series lineup launches today. At $299, the GeForce RTX 5060 stands well-poised to continue the xx60-series’ success as the PC gaming de facto standard, at least from a pricing standpoint. But you shouldn’t buy the RTX 5060 when it appears on store shelves today, and Nvidia knows it – because it’s being very quiet about the launch.

Based on the numbers provided to press by GeForce product manager Justin Walker ahead of Computex, the RTX 5060 should be a middling generational performance upgrade. Look for it to be around 20 percent faster than the ho-hum $299 RTX 4060 it’s replacing, or twice as fast in games that support DLSS 4. (That’s because the RTX 4060’s AI frame generation technology only supports a single AI-generated frame between GPU-generated frames, whereas the RTX 50-series can triple that.)

That’s not the problem. The problem is the RTX 5060 only has 8GB of GDDR7 memory. In the year of Our Lord 2025, that simply doesn’t cut it.

Nvidia says it made the decision to help keep costs down, but such skimpy memory capacity can create performance problems like stuttering, crashes, silently reduced texture quality, and games outright failing to load.

In fact, that’s already happening with the pricier RTX 5060 Ti. Nvidia conveniently only sent reviewers the pricier $429 RTX 5060 Ti to test when it launched. It’s good! But the $379 version with 8GB of memory suffers hard from its limited memory capacity, as the Hardware Unboxed video below amply demonstrates. Even though the 5060 Ti GPU is much faster than the $250 Intel Arc B580 in raw performance (and much more expensive), the Arc B580 beat down Nvidia’s card in many, many games simply because the B580 has 12GB of VRAM. The RTX 5060 Ti’s 8GB capacity repeatedly ran into performance issues in modern games.

Seriously, you should watch the video – it’s great and incredibly illustrative of the issues surrounding 8GB graphics cards in 2025.

Anywho, it’s clear Nvidia is aware of the problem, and the shitstorm brewing over shipping 8GB graphics cards in 2025.

Nvidia didn’t send the 8GB RTX 5060 Ti to reviewers. It isn’t providing early GPU drivers for the RTX 5060 to reviewers either – meaning that even if a reviewer was able to source a physical RTX 5060 ahead of launch (hi!), there is no way to test it and let buyers know the card’s performance when it hits the streets. This is incredibly rare.

Also, the timing of the release and drivers – May 19, smack dab at the start of Computex, the biggest PC industry show of the year – means that many reviewers who would normally test these cards will be in Taipei for the week, far away from their testing rigs. This is also incredibly rare. When Nvidia hard launches products at shows like CES and Computex, it usually provides them to reviewers under NDA at least a week ahead of time. For the RTX 5060, crickets.

Nvidia is burying 8GB reviews. Not that it should be a surprise – Nvidia is burying this launch as a whole. The RTX 5060’s launch date barely squeaked out earlier this month, hidden deep at the end of a blog post brimming with news about DLSS 4 coming to various B-tier games. Then, right at the very end: Oh, hey, guys, the RTX 5060 is launching may 19, keep it on the down low. Get this: There are 37 paragraphs or trailers to get through before the RTX 5060 got two brief paragraphs at the end. One of those two paragraphs is only two sentences.

None of this screams confidence in the product. And if Nvidia isn’t confident in the GeForce RTX 5060… well, I wouldn’t be confident buying it either. It may be fine for esports and many games at 1080p, but the 8GB could be a deal-breaker surprisingly often. We’d know that if there were reviews today! But there aren’t.

Those reviews are coming though. We’ve got YouTube’s own Will Smith toiling in our San Francisco lab today to start generating benchmarks, and other reviewers will no doubt jump on these cards as soon as they’re able. You know, after Computex.

Wait for them. Yes, the GeForce RTX 5060 hits the streets today, and yes, the price looks good on paper. But you shouldn’t buy one and it sure smells like Nvidia knows it. Don’t step in the shitstorm before you’re fully informed.

Further reading: The fate of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50-series lies in DLSS 4’s hands