NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 review: Still 8GB so it needs DLSS to try to save the day

NVIDIA's minimum entry point for Blackwell desktops, the RTX 5050 lags behind the 5060 given the performance/price ratio.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Introduction

NVIDIA launched the RTX 5050 on July 1, 2025. It’s an interesting card because we didn’t have an RTX 4050, but we had a 3050. We didn’t have an RTX 2050, but we had a GTX 1650. And we also had the GTX 1050 if you go way back when, and GTX 950 and 750 back in the day. But this is the first true budget desktop GPU from Team Green in four years. How does it fare? We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s talk specs and how the 5050 stacks up on paper.

This is where things get a little interesting. So this is a $250 card. The step up to the 5060 is $50 more — that’s a 20% increase in price. The 5050 comes with 20 streaming multiprocessors (SMs), and you get 128 CUDA cores per SM, so 2,560 CUDA cores versus 30 SMs on the 5060 — a 50% increase.

Now, the 5050 does have slightly higher clock speeds, and the ASUS card, like I said, is factory overclocked, but it’s not going to close a 50% gap. It’s going to maybe make it to a 40–45% gap on compute. The RTX 5050 also has GDDR6 memory running at 20 GT/s. The 5060 and above all use GDDR7 memory running at 28 GT/s (actually 30 on the RTX 5080, but that’s a different story).

So that’s almost 50% more theoretical performance for the RTX 5060 is what we’re really talking about — probably 40% in a lot of situations, for 20% more money. That right there makes the RTX 5050 a non-starter in my opinion. And yet I bought one because, hey, let’s see how it performs, right? I did pay my own money for this card. Thanks, ASUS and NVIDIA — you didn’t send it to me, and I get to say whatever I want.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Specifications Compared
Graphics Card	GeForce RTX 5050	GeForce RTX 5060	GeForce RTX 4060	GeForce RTX 3050 8GB
Architecture	Blackwell	Ada Lovelace	Ampere	Turing
GPU Codename	GB206	AD107	GA106	TU106
Process Technology	TSMC 4N	TSMC 4N	Samsung 8N	TSMC 12FFN
Billions of Transistors	21.9	18.9	12	10.8
Die Size in Square Millimeters	181	158.7	276	445
GPU Core Clusters	30	24	28	30
GPU Shader ALUs	3840	3072	3584	1920
Tensor / AI / Matrix Cores	120	96	112	240
Ray Tracing Cores	30	24	28	30
Render Output Units (ROPS)	48	48	48	48
Texture Mapping Units (TMUs)	120	96	112	120
Boost Clock in MHz	2497	2460	1777	1680
TFLOPS FP32	19.2	15.1	12.7	6.5
TFLOPS FP16 (FP4/FP8 TFLOPS)	153 (614)	121 (242)	102	52
Gigabytes of VRAM	8	8	12	6
VRAM Speed in GT/s	28	17	15	14
VRAM Bus Width	128	128	192	192
Memory Bandwidth in GB/s	448	272	360	336
L2 / Infinity Cache	32	24	3	3
Total Graphics Power in Watts	145	115	170	160
PCIe Lanes and Version	x8 5.0	x8 4.0	x16 4.0	x16 3.0
Launch Date	May 16, 2025	Jul 21, 2023	Feb 25, 2021	Jan 15, 2019
Official Launch MSRP	$299	$299	$329	$349

Incidentally, the RTX 3050 was the last budget “xx50”-class card from NVIDIA four years ago. It also had 20 SMs, but it was clocked a lot lower. It also doesn’t have the architectural enhancements of Ada Lovelace or Blackwell, so there should be a pretty good gap between the RTX 3050 and the RTX 5050. To quickly summarize the architectural changes, Blackwell versus Ampere gives you some significant changes to the RT cores and tensor cores. The RT cores are theoretically up to four times as fast now, depending on what you’re doing. The tensor cores meanwhile have both FP8 and FP4 support added. Not much uses FP4 right now, but DLSS 4 transformers make use of FP8 on Ada and Blackwell, which is why there’s less of a performance drop when they’re enabled compared to Ampere and Turing GPUs.

Most of the other architectural changes are smaller and won’t matter so much in practice. There’s also a process node shrink from the 3050, going from Samsung 8N to TSMC 4NP, which yields massive gains in efficiency.

ASUS GeForce RTX 5050 Dual OC

Let’s move on to the card itself. I picked up an ASUS Dual RTX 5050 OC off of Newegg. It’s because it was basically the cheapest RTX 5050, and I would prefer ASUS over other options like MSI or Zotac. The ASUS has a slightly higher factory overclock as well, so why not go that route. It’s still a no-frills card — no RGB lighting or anything like that. There are two relatively small fans, and they do have an integrated rim that helps with static pressure and airflow.

The card design is fine overall. It’s got a metal backplate and a single eight-pin power connector. We don’t need any of the 16-pin nonsense on a budget card. And it does have the full-length x16 slot connector, even though only eight lanes are connected for data, which provides support for the card’s weight — unlike that crappy Gigabyte 5060 Ti 8GB that I bought. Yeah, that was a mistake, but it still performs okay.

You get triple DisplayPort 2.1b, with full 80gbps UHBR 20 support. There’s also a single HDMI 2.1b port as well, 56gbps. Basically, it’s what you would expect from an entry-level GPU. There are no frills like RGB lighting, but you still get the dual BIOS switch between performance and quiet modes, which is nice. And I’m not saying this is a garbage card; it’s just the baseline cheapest ASUS brand card that’s available. It’s not the Strix, it’s not even the TUF Gaming, it’s just the Dual.

GeForce RTX 5050 Test Setup

Anyway, that’s about enough on the card itself. Which brings us to the benchmarks. I’ve tested fifteen games at 1080p medium, 1080p ultra, and 1440p ultra results. And then, because I know 1440p ultra is not a realistic setting for a $250 card, I’m going to enable NVIDIA’s DLSS upscaling at 1440p high settings to show what it can do.

GPU Testbed
Asus RTX 5050 Dual OC
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU
Asus ROG Crosshair 870E Hero
G.Skill 2x16GB DDR5
Crucial T705 4TB SSD
Corsair HX1500i PSU
Cooler Master 280mm AIO

And I’m going all-in with the upscaling, using Performance mode. That means 4x upscaling, so in this case, rendering at 720p before upscaling to 1440p. The DLSS results will be in the 1440p charts, but let’s start with 1080p medium.

Of the games, only three have ray tracing enabled: Control Ultimate, Cyberpunk 2077, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Four other games also support ray tracing effects (A Quiet Place, Black Myth Wukong, Dragon Age, and Spider-Man 2), but I leave it off as I don’t generally think the visual fidelity improvements are worth the relatively large hit to performance. So 20% of the games in my test suite are using ray tracing right now, and that’s more than fair I’d say. For the RTX 5050, I don’t think I’d enable RT on any games, just because the GPU isn’t really potent enough to handle that.

Specs for my test PC are in the table on the right as well, with Amazon buy links. This is a very high-end gaming PC, basically about as fast as you can get right now. I’m using AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D to remove as much of the potential CPU bottleneck as possible, with an ASUS ROG CrossHair X870E Hero motherboard. Then I have 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL28 memory from G.Skill and a whomping 4TB PCIe Gen5 SSD from Crucial, all linked up to a beastly 1500W Corsair power supply.

If you were actually building a PC around the RTX 5050, this hardware would be massively overkill. You’d probably want a $200 CPU and $150 motherboard, though I’d still try for 32GB of DDR5 if at all possible. Basically, you’d want a budget PC to go with your budget GPU, and that would probably drop performance just 5% or less on average. Because the CPU and motherboard aren’t really likely to bottleneck an RTX 5050, even at 1080p medium. But for the sake of consistency among test results, everything is run on my top-tier PC that’s designed to handle every GPU up to and including the RTX 5090.

GeForce RTX 5050 Gaming Benchmarks at 1080p Medium

Starting with 1080p medium settings, we find pretty much what you’d expect from looking at the specifications of the RTX 5050. It’s pretty much tied with the last generation RTX 4060, because the 5050 has faster VRAM to make up for the reduction in shader cores. So it’s $50 less than what the RTX 4060 cost, and it delivers about the same performance. That’s fine though not really amazing, but then given the inflation of the past couple of years, perhaps paying less for the same performance is as good as it gets.

The RTX 5050 also provides a pretty sizable jump from the RTX 3050, which is totally expected given the four year gap between releases. It’s 60% faster than the 3050 8GB — not the castrated 6GB model that came out after the RTX 40-series began shipping, which would drop performance about 20%.

Something else to notice is that the 5050 is also slightly faster than the Arc B580, which is interesting because the B580 has 12GB and a 192-bit interface, compared to the 5050’s 8GB and a 128-bit interface. There’s more L2 cache on the 5050, I believe it has 24MB for the GB207 chip. Anyway, it just goes to show how much work Intel still needs to do to close the gap. Intel has a bigger chip, with 50% more VRAM capacity and bandwidth, and a higher power draw… and it’s slightly behind the RTX 5050 at 1080p medium.

Obviously, the RTX 5050 isn’t going to touch the RTX 5060 Ti or the RX 9060 XT, and the RTX 5060 is about 25% faster. That’s not as big of a gap as maybe the specs would seem to suggest, but we’re at 1080p medium so we’ll have to see what happens at higher settings.

The individual game charts are available in the above gallery, just click on any of the images and you can cycle through the full-size charts. There’s not a lot to say about the results that differs from the main chart. The slowest games in my test suite are Cyberpunk 2077 and Final Fantasy XVI, both of which fail to break 60 FPS on the RTX 5050, landing instead right near the 40 FPS mark. Only two games, Indiana Jones and Witchfire, manage to break the 100 FPS barrier.

Across the fifteen tested games, we’re looking at 80 FPS for the RTX 5050, with twelve of the games averaging 60 FPS or more. Basically, for native resolution gaming, 1080p medium, maybe 1080p high, is going to be the sweet spot for the RTX 5050.

And maybe it’s not critical, but I should note that five of the games I’m benchmarking use Unreal Engine, and I think they’re all running UE5: A Quiet Place, Black Myth, MechWarrior, Stalker 2, and Witchfire. I’m confident Unreal Engine is the most popular game engine these days, at least for relatively demanding PC games — Unity probably gets used more for lightweight games. Anyway, UE5 feels like a bloated pig in most of these games, particularly at higher settings. 1080p medium isn’t too bad, but maxed out settings can easily exceed the capabilities of even top-shelf hardware. Like Borderlands 4, another UE5 game, struggles to get past 60 FPS on the RTX 5050, coming up short even at 1080p medium.

The end of the gallery also shows the raw power, power efficiency, clock speeds, and temperature data for the various GPUs. There’s not a whole lot to say about that. The RTX 5050 is reasonably efficient, and uses less power than any of the other GPUs we’re showing in the charts. Clock speeds are also higher than the 5060, to help close the 50% gap in shader counts, but the resulting efficiency ends up being a sidegrade from the RTX 4060. The ASUS Dual card isn’t super cool running, but it stays below 65C and ends up being fine for a budget graphics card that only draws about 135W of power.

GeForce RTX 5050 Gaming Benchmarks at 1080p Ultra

Kicking the settings up to 1080p Ultra will present some difficulties for the RTX 5050 and its 8GB VRAM. Frankly, you probably want to stick to high settings on the card, but these tests intentionally push to the limit. Where we saw 80 FPS at medium settings, that takes a precipitous drop to just 47 FPS at ultra settings. That’s a 41% drop on the 5050, but perhaps more critically, on the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB we only measured a 32% dip. That means the VRAM issue accounts for roughly an additional 10% reduction in performance at 1080p ultra, and it will become even more of a problem at 1440p ultra.

And tomorrow’s 1080p medium to high settings will be like today’s 1080p ultra settings. That’s always the way things go, which means more and more games in the coming years are going to need to drop down to medium or even low settings to run well withing an 8GB VRAM capacity. Unless NVIDIA’s NTC (Neural Texture Compression) actually sees a lot of uptake, but I’ll believe that when I see it.

Overall, at 1080p ultra, the RTX 5060 now has a bigger jump in performance. That’s not good for the RTX 5050. If you’re paying 20% more and getting 31% more performance, you should buy the more expensive card, generally speaking. But they’re still both 8GB cards, so I don’t love that. Also, the 5050 ties the 3060 12GB in our overall metric. So that’s four years to shave off $100 from the price I guess.

The Arc B580’s 12GB VRAM helps more at 1080p Ultra settings. But drivers are a problem with Arc still, and we’ll see that in the individual game charts, especially on the one percent lows. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail, but we’ll get to those momentarily. AMD’s RX 7600 XT, which has 16GB of VRAM, still comes in slightly below the 5050 as well, even though there’s one game (Indiana Jones) that totally failed to run on the 5050 due to VRAM constraints. Too bad there’s no RX 9050 XT to compete directly with the 5050….

The RTX 4060 takes a slightly larger lead at 1080p ultra as well, mostly because one of the games (Stalker 2) showed significantly worse performance on the newer 5050 card — possibly some driver tuning that still needs to be completed. It’s only a 6% gap, compared to the 3% difference we saw at medium settings.

Running through the individual games, fourteen remain technically playable — meaning, they break 30 FPS, though four of the games are dangerously close to that boundary line. More concerning is that, even with rounding, only four games manage to reach 60 FPS or higher (God of War, Spider-Man 2, Space Marine 2, and Witchfire). Compare that with the RTX 5060, where half of the games get to 60 FPS (give or take). Again, for the price of a single game, I’d rather spend the additional money. And then I’d still enable DLSS, which brings us to the 1440p testing results.

GeForce RTX 5050 Gaming Benchmarks at 1440p Ultra (plus 1440p High + DLSS)

Finally, let’s look at the 1440p numbers. Obviously, there’s that top line I’ll get to in a second, but with 29 frames per second, we’ve dropped below 30 FPS on average. Lots of games aren’t going to hit 30. Some of the games I test will break 30, but in general, maybe half of them are even mostly playable. I would definitely want more performance than the 5050 offers for native 1440p gaming.

So how do you get more performance? Hey, what about this NVIDIA DLSS tech? Running with high settings instead of ultra reduces the memory requirements, and then we’re using 4x upscaling, so we’re rendering at 720p. You would think that would look terrible, but DLSS does a really good job of upscaling and doesn’t look as bad as you might expect. I’d argue that 1440p with DLSS performance mode upscaling looks better than 1080p native, even while rendering fewer pixels.

The net result: We’re going from around 30 frames per second to 72 frames per second. That’s about two and a half times the performance, and I’d say it’s a worthwhile trade-off to consider. I’m not going to say it looks the same as 1440p native, but for the smoothness of gameplay, if you can only afford a $250 card, the RTX 5050 starts to look a lot better once you factor in DLSS.

All the other NVIDIA cards would get a similar boost in performance, though, so don’t think that RTX 5050 high plus DLSS competes directly against the 5060 Ti 16GB running 1440p native at ultra settings, because that’s not the same. You could turn the settings to high and enable DLSS, and the 5060 Ti would also see that same 2–2.5X boost in performance.

What I’m getting at is that 1440p high with Performance mode upscaling is playable for sure on an RTX 5050. You could even drop to Balanced mode and do 3x upscaling and still get around 60 frames per second. Quality mode is going to drop below 60, but quality mode at 1440p looks really good, in my opinion — almost as good as native, sometimes better if you’re comparing to native with a poor TAA implementation (like Unreal Engine 5’s TSR).

You can also turn on frame generation, and in some games, multi-frame generation. You’ll sacrifice some input latency in order to get higher frames per second, but they’re not all the same type of frames. So if we’re getting 72 FPS with DLSS upscaling, and you turn on MFG4X — multi-frame generation 4x mode — maybe you bump up to 225 frames per second, right? And you go, “Oh, that’s triple the performance.” But really, what you’re doing is taking one-fourth of 225. That means the game would now be rendering at 56 FPS and then quadrupling that to 225. We’ve gone from a real rendering speed of 72 FPS with input sampling at the same 72 FPS, to a game that’s rendering and sampling at 56 FPS but then using frame generation to create three intermediate frames that don’t have any new user input.

The result is that MFG4X basically always results in higher latency and a slightly more sluggish feel on input. If you’re getting above 150 after MFG4X, I think it feels fine. If you’re dropping below 120, though, it can start to feel marginal.

Again, quickly looking at the individual game results, only about half of the games in my test suite break 30 FPS at 1440p ultra. Of the games that fail to do so, six are very much in the “really bad experience” range of around 20 FPS or less. And there’s also Indiana Jones that completely fails to run on 8GB NVIDIA GPUs with ultra settings. But then you turn on DLSS and drop to high quality settings, and you end up with often higher than 1080p medium native performance. Indiana Jones still fails due to a lack of VRAM, though, which again is really damning for an NVIDIA promoted game to fail in that way on a whole bunch of existing RTX cards.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Final Thoughts

What do I think of the RTX 5050 overall? It’s not a bad card, but it’s priced a bit too high. If this were a $200 card, it’d be great; then the gap between it and the 5060 would make more sense. But right now, you’re getting about 30~40 percent more performance from the 5060 for 20% more money, which makes the 5060 the better buy. And I really wish there were a 12GB RTX 5060. It wouldn’t even need a 192-bit interface; just use the same 3GB chips that are on the RTX 6000 Pro or the RTX 5090 laptop GPU. But I guess we’ll need to wait for the RTX 5060 Super next year to scratch that itch, maybe.

Because NVIDIA didn’t want to do that. It wanted market segmentation, and it wanted to limit the amount of VRAM so that companies aren’t picking up budget consumer cards to run larger AI models. There’s still the 5060 Ti 16GB for that crowd, but it’s a $430 card instead of a $300 card. We’ll have to see just how many of the 50-series Blackwell GPUs get the 3GB GDDR7 upgrades next year; hopefully all of them, as an RTX 5090 Super with 48GB of VRAM would be freaking awesome, but that’s probably too far up the ladder as that would definitely eat into the professional GPU sales.

Anyway, both the RTX 5050 and RTX 5060 have 8GB, but the 5060 uses GDDR7 while the 5050 has GDDR6. It’s kind of weird, 40% more bandwidth, but zero percent more capacity. Ultimately, the RTX 5050 is okay, especially if you’re invested in NVIDIA’s DLSS ecosystem, as that really helps performance. DLSS is still the gold standard for upscaling image fidelity, and AMD and Intel still need to do more work to close that gap. And then they both need to get FSR4 and XeSS2 to get used in a LOT more games!

I don’t have a problem with DLSS image quality. I do, however, have a problem with the multi-frame generation marketing. I’m not saying it’s terrible to enable framegen and MFG, but the resulting “performance” numbers are highly biased. An MFG4X game running at 200 FPS does not feel like a game running 200 FPS native. It feels maybe like 80~100 FPS I’d say, and if you drop down to 120 FPS, it feels more like 40 FPS. So when I see a chart showing MFG4X at 140 FPS, I immediately think, “Yeah, that’s not going to be an awesome experience… it’s pure marketing BS.”

Ultimately, I would still pay 20% more for the RTX 5060, or better yet, wait for a 5060 Super card with 12GB from NVIDIA. That just feels like the more future-proof option. The problem right now is that the 5070 is more than double the price of the 5050. Even the 5060 Ti 16GB is still about a $150 upgrade. So if you want more than 8GB from NVIDIA, you’re kind of stuck.

Intel’s Arc B580 might seem like a great alternative, with basically the same price as the RTX 5050 with 50% more memory, and yet performance is still similar at 1080p medium — and you don’t get DLSS. So it’s a better card overall if you don’t factor in upscaling, but once you do, the RTX 5050 makes a strong case for itself. AMD is in a slightly better position in terms of drivers, but the 9060 XT 8GB has to compete against the 5060, not the 5050. It does win that battle on raw performance, but also loses when you factor in DLSS.

That’s it for this review. Thanks for reading and/or watching the video. Please support my channel, like, and subscribe, as this is all totally independent content right now — no one’s paying me to do this. My YouTube channel doesn’t have quite enough subscribers for me to get paid there yet, so please help change that. And let me know what else you’d like to see tested. More games? More GPU tests like this? Or should I do an article and video focused on upscaling? Let me know in the comments section.