Nvidia’s RTX 5050 benchmarks are in — and they’re not great

Nvidia has been a little circumspect when it comes to sending out review units for its newest RTX graphics cards as of late. (That’s why there’s no PCWorld review yet for the RTX 5050 or 5060 or the 8GB version of the RTX 5060 Ti.) But reviewers gonna review… and the first reviews for the new RTX 5050 aren’t great.

Korean site Quasar Zone (spotted by Tom’s Hardware) has a full review and benchmark suite of the Colorful iGame version of the RTX 5050, which comes with a Blackwell processor, 2560 CUDA cores, 8GB of GDDR6 memory, a 128-bit bus, and a $250 USD price tag. (That’s the suggested retail price, anyway. As with all graphics cards at the moment, your results may vary when you get to the checkout screen.)

The results of Quasar Zone’s tests are less than impressive. The RTX 5050 just barely manages to hold even with the RTX 4060 from two years ago in most straight benchmarks, losing by a small margin in some. Intel’s Arc B580 (12GB, $250 retail) beats it handily in most synthetic benchmarks, though an average of in-game testing shows it only winning out by a small sliver—there are still a lot of games where Intel’s hardware and drivers are at a disadvantage.

There is a bright spot for team green, though, and it’s in frame generation. Flipping on the switch for the signature feature of the RTX 50 series allows the RTX 5050 to pull ahead of the RTX 4060 by a considerable amount—nearly double versus the older card with single-frame generation and DLSS enabled. That’s to be expected, since the Blackwell chips can, indeed, generate double or even triple the artificial frames of its predecessors. This led to some questionable claims when the series was introduced, and those who are interested in multiplayer competitive games (the “fake frames” crowd) won’t be won over.

Even with the boost from frame generation, it seems that the RTX 5050 is not the budget competitor that Nvidia needs in this segment… or at least that consumers want from Nvidia in this segment. Nvidia is still making an obscene amount of profit from its wide portfolio on the AI boom, so it’s not as if it really has to compete on the lower end. And it has a virtual monopoly on desktop graphics, anyway.