By Since an RTX 4050 desktop card never appeared, we assumed that this generation would be no exception to Nvidia’s somewhat unexpected revelation of the GeForce RTX 5050 desktop graphics card. However, here it is: Since the 2022 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, Nvidia’s most reasonably priced graphics card is the RTX 5050, which retails for $249. Zotac’s Gaming GeForce RTX 5050 Solo, a snubnose variant of the card that we tested, has a respectable amount of power for the price, but not enough to overtake its rivals. The AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT will enhance your PC gaming experience, while the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 unlocks a better experience for just an additional $50.
GPU
Based on Nvidia’s “Blackwell” microarchitecture, the smallest graphics die, the Nvidia GB207, is found in every GeForce RTX 5050 card. The graphics chip contains 20 ray-tracing cores, 32 raster operation processors (ROPs), 80 texture mapping units (TMUs), and 2,560 CUDA cores.
At $249, the RTX 5050 has some potential as Nvidia’s most affordable current graphics card, despite being a major drop-down from the GeForce RTX 5060. It is in competition with the $249 Intel Arc B580 and the previous version 269$ AMD Radeon RX 7600, at this price.
On paper, the RTX 5050 is less powerful than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 due to this resource loadout, but that isn’t the whole picture. When all else is equal, the Blackwell design outperforms the “Ada Lovelace” architecture included in all RTX 40-series graphics chips due to improvements.
The faster clock speed of the RTX 5050 is another element that helps it outperform the RTX 4060. When maxed out, the RTX 5050 has a little 4% edge because of its higher base clock speed and 110MHz faster turbo clock.
ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 5050 Solo DLSS 4 8GB GDDR6 128-bit 20 Gbps PCIE 5.0 Gaming Graphics Card, SFF-Ready Super Compact Card, ZT-B50500G-10L
All RTX 50-series graphics cards employ the most recent GDDR7 memory, while the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 is the only one that uses GDDR6 memory. But compared to the RTX 4060, the RTX 5050 employs a faster type of GDDR6 RAM. The faster memory causes the RTX 5050 to have almost 18% greater memory bandwidth than the RTX 4060, even though both cards have a 128-bit memory interface. Both GPUs have 8GB of GDDR6 memory; therefore, neither has a memory edge.
As the graphics card industry adapts to new releases, these elements should give the RTX 5050 the edge over the RTX 4060 in terms of gaming performance. For as long as they are available, discounted RTX 4060 graphics cards may be a viable substitute for the RTX 5050; however, this is unlikely to last.
Our Test Setup
Our current graphics card test bed has two 16GB sticks of DDR5 RAM set to 6,000MHz and an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processor running on a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master motherboard. We control processor temps with a 360mm Cooler Master liquid cooler. A 1,500-watt Corsair power supply and two 2TB Crucial PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs are also included in the system. We use Windows 11 with the most recent updates installed for all of our testing.
The most formidable rival to the RTX 5050 will probably be the similarly priced Arc B580 from Intel. The pricing of AMD’s Radeon RX 7600 and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 places them at a disadvantage, even though they will probably be competitive as well.
Benchmarks for Raster-Only Games
In games that do not support ray tracing, the RTX 5050 did not perform any better. Although the RTX 5050 was marginally quicker than the Arc B580 and the RTX 4060, the Radeon RX 7600 XT and the RTX 5050 were virtually tied in Total War: Three Kingdoms.
Although the relative placement of the test scores varied significantly in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, there were no significant shocks. The RTX 5050 was ahead of the Radeon RX 7600, and the 7600 XT and RTX 4060 were practically tied with it. In turn, the Arc B580 fared better than the RTX 5050.
Thermal Benchmarks and Power Consumption
During certain tests, we measure the GPU test bed’s power consumption using a Kill-A-Watt wall meter. Given its generally poor performance, one would think the RTX 5050 would outperform some of its rivals in terms of efficiency. There was excellent reason to believe that the RTX 5050 would be no exception to the rule that smaller graphics chips use less power. It wasn’t like that.
Compared to the RTX 4060 and RTX 5060, the RTX 5050 consumed more power during content production tests. Additionally, the RTX 5050 consumed more power than the RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 4060 Ti during our Adobe Premiere Pro trial. The RTX 5050 used almost the same amount of power as the RTX 5060 for gaming, so it wasn’t much better.
During gaming, the RTX 4060 consumed more power than the RTX 5050, and during all testing, the Intel Arc B580 consumed more power than the RTX 5050. However, in comparison to its capabilities, the RTX 5050’s power consumption seems a little excessive overall.
Conclusion
Although a new graphics card is always exciting, the GeForce RTX 5050 from Nvidia feels inadequate, or at least not nearly adequate for its price. The RTX 5050 is surprisingly powerful for its pricing when it comes to content creation chores, but its gaming performance is subpar.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and the Intel Arc B580 are two graphics cards that the RTX 5050 can occasionally rival, albeit these instances were more rare than common. It outperformed AMD’s Radeon RX 7600 and RX 7600 XT by a significant margin, but as long as the Intel Arc B580 and the RTX 4060 continue to offer superior performance at reasonable costs, the triumph is meaningless. (The longevity of the last-generation RTX 4060 is a different story.)
Even though I didn’t talk about the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 much in my review, the bar charts above clearly show how much better it performs than the RTX 5050. Comparatively speaking, if you have the extra cash, the RTX 5060 is a no-brainer because it offers significantly higher speed for only $50 more. Look for an Intel Arc B580, which has an MSRP of about $249, if you can’t afford to pay more for an RTX 5060. If not, a heavily discounted RTX 4060 might be a powerful substitute, but only if you can locate one.
