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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB review: More VRAM and a price ‘paper cut’ could make for a compelling GPU
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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 review: $549 price and performance look decent on paper
With all the above caveats in mind, let’s look at Nvidia’s internal performance data. It compared the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB with the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB — yes, the high memory configurations of both — along with the older RTX 3060 Ti, an 8GB card. It provides performance for eight different games, six of which support MFG 4X and DLSS 4. That wildly skews the apparent performance potential, and as noted, you can’t take MFG 4X data (or framegen data) at face value. There’s also one game (Plague Tale Requiem) with DLSS 3 framegen support and one final game with no frame generation that serves more as a baseline view of performance.
Depending on how you feel about frame generation, that last game, Delta Force, makes the generational performance improvements look pretty mediocre. There’s almost no uplift from the 3060 Ti to the 4060 Ti, and only about a 17% uplift going from the 4060 Ti to the 5060 Ti. But, considering what we said earlier about specifications, raw compute, and memory bandwidth, that seems about right.
The rest of the games show much, much larger deltas in performance, but Nvidia also uses native rendering without Reflex — which isn’t technically part of DLSS but is required by DLSS 3/4 frame generation — to again inflate the performance differences. Many games can hit VRAM limitations on the 8GB 3060 Ti, but without non-framegen numbers for all three GPUs, it’s hard to come to any firm conclusions.
Is the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB faster than an RTX 4060 Ti 16GB? Undoubtedly, and it should be significantly faster than an RTX 3060 Ti. It has two generations of architecture upgrades, twice as much VRAM, and at worst, it matches the 3060 Ti on memory bandwidth — with L2 cache making the effective bandwidth much higher. But if you look at the above chart and think, “Wow, the RTX 5060 Ti is over four times as fast as an RTX 3060 Ti….” Well, if you believe that, then you might also believe the RTX 5070 is as fast as an RTX 5090.
Similar comparisons were provided between the RTX 5060, RTX 4060, and RTX 3060 12GB — at least, we’re pretty sure Nvidia used the 3060 12GB, but there’s an RTX 3060 8GB model that came out late in the Ampere 30-series life cycle. Anyway, without frame generation and MFG, the generational improvements appear pretty tame. With only framegen (Plague Tale Requiem), there are more substantial FPS gains, and with MFG 4X, the future RTX 5060 can push substantially higher performance.
Note also that these tests use 1080p with max settings, where the 5060 Ti opted for 1440p testing. That probably makes sense for 8GB cards like the 4060/5060, and for a $299 GPU it’s also a reasonable target. However, DLSS upscaling doesn’t look as good when upscaling 1280×720 to 1920×1080, as it tends to do better when it has a higher input resolution.
More critically, look at the second slide. Five of the games Nvidia shows, using quality mode upscaling plus MFG 4X, don’t break 160 FPS. That’s sort of our own internal target for where framegen feels “pretty darn good” — when you have a base input sampling rate and framerate of 40 FPS or more. Star Wars Outlaws and Alan Wake 2 don’t even reach 120 FPS, meaning the base rendering and sampling rate falls below 30 FPS. They’re still playable, but compared to the same games running at even 60 FPS without framegen, the feel is very different.
Nvidia will also have RTX 5060 laptops coming soon (ish?), which will be relatively close to their desktop 5060 counterpart in performance. If you compare the above performance slide for 5060 laptops to the desktop 5060, the only game that shows more than a 10% difference is Avowed, which is probably more CPU-limited. The other eight games show less than a 3% difference.
RTX 5060 laptops should be available next month, alongside the desktop RTX 5060, with a base price of $1,099. And unlike the desktop GPUs, we think there’s a better chance you’ll be able to find the laptops in stock. (Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking….) But we’re still not super keen on the 8GB VRAM configuration.
Nvidia could have fixed our concerns by using 3GB GDDR7 chips, which is exactly what it does on the RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell workstation and data center GPUs. Of course, both of those cost a lot more than a base model RTX 5060.
Nvidia won’t be making any Founders Edition RTX 5060 Ti or RTX 5060 cards, leaving all three variants to its AIB (add-in board) partners. That also means Nvidia has no direct control over AIB graphics card pricing. We’ve seen how that played out with AMD’s RX 9070 series GPUs, so we don’t expect most AIBs to sell many base MSRP cards.
Still, we could see 5060 models in the $300~$330 range, which is much better than paying the same amount (or more!) for a previous generation RTX 4060. Likewise, the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB — and we can’t emphasize enough how questionable the 8GB variant is — could see real-world prices of $430~$470, which would also be far better than spending $700 on an RTX 4060 Ti 16GB.
The RTX 5060 Ti officially launches tomorrow, so check back then for our full review. We’ll also be looking at real-world availability and pricing. There’s a good chance the 5060 Ti will still sell out quite quickly, but we’ll have to wait and see. The full slide deck from Nvidia’s RTX 5060 series presentation can be found below for your reference.
