NVIDIA Unveils GeForce RTX 5060 Family, Bringing Blackwell Under $500
NVIDIA's Blackwell Powers The GeForce RTX 5060 Series, Starting At $299
These new GPUs are based on the very same Blackwell architecture as the previous GeForce RTX 50 series releases. That means you get the improvements to AI performance as well as the novel AI Management Processor, you get DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation, and the improved RT cores with RTX Mega Geometry support.
You also get GDDR7 memory, which, as we discussed last week, could be a big ace in the hole for these GPUs against AMD's forthcoming competition. While NVIDIA doesn't actually specify this in the documentation that it provided to us pre-launch, these cards are thought to use 128-bit memory buses. The extremely high transfer rate of GDDR7 memory means that, despite the narrow bus width, a card like the GeForce RTX 5060 could still push as much as 448 GB/second of memory bandwidth—nearly as much as a TITAN X, which employed a 384-bit memory bus back in its day.
Multi-Frame Generation doesn't increase latency over regular Frame Generation.
GeForce RTX 5060 And RTX 5060 Ti Projected Performance
NVIDIA's emphasis for this launch is on DLSS 4. The company says that you can improve all three critical aspects of gaming graphics with DLSS simultaneously, those being image quality, frame rate, and responsiveness in terms of input lag. Indeed, the company breaks out a claim of "50X" performance on a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti compared to the GeForce GTX 1060—but that claim relies on multi-frame generation, of course.
NVIDIA proudly claims "2X FRAME RATE" over the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, but we should point out that claim is in light of the fact that most of the performance numbers presented are using 4x Multi-Frame Generation (MFG), which is only available on the Blackwell cards in this graph. It's important to make this distinction as the performance uplift, in terms of pure rasterization, is going to be much less than what you see here. The Delta Force numbers at the bottom are an indicator of where straight rasterization performance should land.
The story's similar for the GeForce RTX 5060, although it does show some more substantial gains on the GeForce RTX 4060 in like-for-like benchmarks using A Plague Tale: Requiem and Delta Force.
This chart shows some of the key specifications for the new cards. Improved compute performance and radically improved AI performance aside, you also see strongly improved RT performance, upgraded video processing capabilities, and PCIe 5.0 support, as well as a welcome move to DisplayPort 2.1 with UHBR20 support.
In terms of pricing, the slide above details this along with the launch dates. Simply put, NVIDIA's pricing these parts aggressively. $429 for the 16GB GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is a good bit cheaper than the 16GB model of the RTX 4060 Ti, and that's to say nothing of the RTX 5060 maintaining a $299 price point, despite continued high inflation, tariffs and other financial goings-on.
GeForce RTX 5060 Series Is Set To Take On The Mainstream And In Laptops Too
In all honesty, if the cards are actually available at this price, NVIDIA's doing gamers a solid here. As the company points out, there are fifty million GeForce gamers out there on 60-class GPUs from the 10 series to the 30 series. That's a lot of folks who could use an upgrade, and a $299 RTX 5060 could be the ticket. It's a shame about the 8GB memory capacity, though. We would have liked to have seen a 12GB GDDR7 card option, though that most certainly would add to the cost.
NVIDIA's also announcing the GeForce RTX 5060 family GPUs for laptops, although these machines won't be available immediately. Instead, they're coming along in May of this year. All the usual suspects will be offering laptops based on the new GPUs, but we don't have any particular details on individual machines at this time. However, stay tuned to our news channel as announcements may be coming as soon as today.
Finally, be sure to also look for our detailed review coverage of NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5060 series desktop cards, coming in hot.
