With a very quiet launch, and a distinct lack of review samples doing the rounds, the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 isn’t the talk of the town right now, but we have now been given our first glimpse of its performance. Graphics card maker Inno3D has revealed the results from some of its own benchmarks, where it pitted the new budget gaming GPU against the RTX 4060 and RTX 3060, and while the RTX 5050 wins in some synthetic tests, the RTX 4060 is faster in real game benchmarks.
The RTX 5050 represents the first time Nvidia has produced a sub-$299 gaming GPU since the RTX 3050 back in January 2022, but it has a severely cut-down spec compared to its next GPU up in the range, which we tested for our GeForce RTX 5060 review. With just 2,560 CUDA cores at its disposal, the RTX 5050 has much less rendering power than the 5060, which has 3,840 CUDA, but it looks as though the improvements from moving to the Blackwell architecture do enable this new GPU to line up with the last-gen RTX 4060.
Inno3D published its results on Weibo, which requires an account to access the full story, but the benchmark screenshots have also been shared by X (formerly Twitter) user harukaze5719, and they show that the new GPU is quicker than the older RTX 3060 across the board, but that it’s a close-run competition against the RTX 4060.
Looking at the results from 3DMark below, you can see that the RTX 4060 still has the edge in tests, such as TimeSpy, which stresses raw rendering power from the CUDA cores. That’s no surprise, given that the RTX 4060 has 512 more of them, even if they are based on the older Ada architecture. However, the RTX 5050 overtakes the RTX 4060 in the Port Royal and Speedway tests, showing that the new budget GPU potentially has more ray tracing power under the hood.
Meanwhile, the real game tests show that the RTX 5050 lags behind the RTX 4060, although it’s worth noting that all the tests are based on rasterization, rather than ray tracing, where the RTX 4060’s extra CUDA cores will give it an advantage. The original text in the graph was in Chinese, so we’ve translated it to make the graph below.
As you can see, the margins are still tight in some circumstances, with just 1fps separating the two GPUs in Far Cry 6, for example, and 4fps in Borderlands 3, but there are larger differences between the two GPUs in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Horizon Zero Dawn. On the plus side, the RTX 5050 is again well in front of the RTX 3060 in all these tests.
Of course, these results only paint a small part of the performance picture, plus they come from a graphics card maker, rather than an independent reviewer, and they’re all based on old games and synthetic benchmarks.
We advise waiting for our full Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 review before you decide to buy this card or not, but in the meantime you can read our guide to buying the best GPU, where we take you through all the best options right now, all of which have been fully reviewed and tested with our game benchmark suite. At the budget end of the scale, you can read our new AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT review, to see why this GPU is our current top choice.
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