RTX 5050 Benchmarks Are In—And They’re Not Great
Nvidia’s been surprisingly tight-lipped about review units for its latest RTX graphics cards, and now we might know why. The first independent review of the new RTX 5050 is out, and the results aren’t exactly flattering.
Korean tech site Quasar Zone got its hands on a retail version of the Colorful iGame RTX 5050, packing a Blackwell GPU, 2560 CUDA cores, 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and a 128-bit memory bus—all for a suggested $250 price tag. But that MSRP may not hold when actual retail pricing comes into play.
Performance-wise, the RTX 5050 struggles to outmatch the RTX 4060 from two years ago. It lags behind slightly in synthetic tests, while Intel’s Arc B580, a competing $250 card with 12GB of VRAM, beats it in most synthetic benchmarks. However, real-world gaming performance shows the two neck-and-neck, with the Arc card only narrowly ahead.
The one bright spot for Nvidia? Frame generation. With DLSS and frame generation enabled, the RTX 5050 pulls well ahead of the RTX 4060—sometimes nearly doubling the framerate. That’s thanks to Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture, which allows for more aggressive frame generation than previous generations. Still, this won’t matter much to competitive gamers wary of “fake frames” and input lag.
Bottom line: even with Nvidia’s powerful AI-based frame tools, the RTX 5050 feels more like a sidegrade than an upgrade. And considering that Nvidia’s making billions from its AI hardware and already dominates the GPU market, there’s little pressure for it to truly compete in the budget space right now.
