MSI GeForce RTX 5050 Shadow 2X Review: Budget Blackwell Gaming Tested
Homeworld 3 Benchmarks
Homeworld 3
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Benchmarks
Next up, we’ve got some benchmarks from Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. The original Horizon Zero Dawn was initially released as an exclusive on the PlayStation 4, but was ported to the PC a couple of years back. A few months ago, however, a remastered version of the game was released, with upgraded visuals and support for more advanced graphics technologies. For those unfamiliar with the game, it follows a character named Aloy, who is on a quest to unravel mysteries of a future Earth ruled by machines. She is outcast from her tribe and fights to uncover her past and stop an impending threat.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered
With DLSS or FSR enabled, the GeForce RTX 5050's position relative to the other cards we tested doesn't change, but we want to point out that the card is still able to break the 100FPS mark with frame gen enabled at 1440p.
The Talos Principle II Testing
Croteam’s The Talos Principle II is a sequel to the original first-person, puzzle-based adventure game that features philosophical themes and expansive environments with increasingly more difficult challenges as the game progresses. It was originally released for multiple platforms, but has been continually updated on the PC.
The Talos Principle II
The Talos Principle II had the GeForce RTX 5050 trailing the Radeon RX 7600 XT once again, at both resolutions.
Turn on DLSS or FRS (in balanced mode) boosts framerates across the board, but ultimately doesn't change the overall story -- the GeForce RTX 5050 doubles the performance of the previous-gen RTX 3050, but the mainstream Radeons (and obviously the higher-end GeForces) are faster here.
Assassin's Creed Mirage Benchmarks
Ubisoft’s Assassin's Creed Mirage is an action-adventure game set in 9th century Baghdad, Iraq. It is the thirteenth major installment in the storied Assassin's Creed franchise and the successor to 2020's Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
Assassin's Creed Mirage
We saw more of the same with Assassin's Creed Mirage. The GeForce RTX 5050 couldn't quite catch the Radeon RX 7600 XT at either resolution we tested.
Enabling DLSS or FSR in Assassin's Creed Mirage significantly increases performance, but not the rankings. Still, we want to point out that the GeForce RTX 5050 nearly hits 100FPS, with a 1% low above 60 FPS at 1440p in this game with maximum image quality details.
Black Myth: Wukong Benchmarks
Black Myth: Wukong is a title with a storied history. It began development way back in 2018, and was first showed to the public with an incredible trailer in 2020, but the pandemic and other internal struggles delayed the game's development and it wasn't released until last year. Black Myth: Wukong supports a variety of upscalers, including NVIDIA's DLSS, AMD's FSR3, Intel's XeSS, and Epic's own TSR. Using DLSS, FSR3, or TSR gives you the option of enabling frame generation too, which you'll need if you want to crank up the visuals in this stunning title to maintain smooth animation.
Black Myth: Wukong's Cinematic image quality preset with full ray tracing enabled (at medium quality) is a GPU crusher, but it clearly show's NVIDIA's advantage with taxing ray tracing workloads. Here, the GeForce RTX 5050 is able to outrun even the Radeon RX 9060 XT and trials only the higher-end GeForces at both resolutions.
If you want to play Black Myth: Wukong with the highest image quality settings, resolution scaling with DLSS or FSR are essentially required. And with DLSS enabled with frame-gen, the GeForce RTX 5050 is able to break the 40 FPS mark here.
Black Myth: Wukong
If you want to play Black Myth: Wukong with the highest image quality settings, resolution scaling with DLSS or FSR are essentially required. And with DLSS enabled with frame-gen, the GeForce RTX 5050 is able to break the 40 FPS mark here.
F1 24 Racing Sim Benchmarks
F1 24 is Codemaster’s latest Formula One racing simulation, and like previous version of the game, it sports impressive visuals. This latest addition to the franchise supports DirectX 12 with ray tracing, and it incorporates support for a number of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) features and NVIDIA technologies, like DLSS with frame generation. We tested the games with its Ultra High graphics preset, with ray tracing and TAA enabled at a couple of resolutions to see what these graphics cards could do.
F1 24
F1 24 had the GeForce RTX 5050 and Radeon RX 7600 XT trading blows depending on the resolution. Both cards, however, put up playable framerates at 1080p, but at 1440p, you have to step up to a RTX 560 class card (or higher) to approach or exceed the 60 FPS mark.
With DLSS or FSR 2 (Balanced) enabled in F1 24, all of cards see a nice performance uplift, and the GeForce RTX 5050 nearly hits 90 FPS with frame-gen enabled, but it ultimately only outruns the GeForce RTX 3050.
Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmarks
Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the Cyberpunk tabletop role-playing game franchise. The tabletop game was published for the first time all the way back in 1988, and the intervening 30-odd years has not changed the game world all that much. As a result, Cyberpunk 2077 looks somewhat retro-futuristic, as this is how people in the '80s imagined what the future would look like.The PC game make use of virtually every advanced DirectX graphics technology and features support for DLSS, FSR and XeSS, and after a somewhat rocky release, it has been significantly updated and optimized for a multitude of hardware configurations. Although it is no longer considered a new title, Cyberpunk 2077 remains a showcase for many advanced graphics technologies.
We tested a pre-release version of Cyberpunk 2077 that's been updated with support for DLSS 4's transformer model and multi-frame generation. This is an important note because Cyberpunk foreshadows how future games, that are optimized for the Blackwell GPU architecture and the RTX 50 series, may perform relative to previous-gen GPUs.
Cyberpunk 2077
With DLSS and frame generation enabled, however, the GeForce RTX 5050 nearly hits 60FPS with ultra settings, though its 8GB of memory does hinder its minimums in this game. We should also note that enabling 3x and 4x multi-frame gen didn't increase the GeForce RTX 5050's performance here either, which is why you don't see the numbers represented. We did try testing it multiple times, but performance was flat vs. 2x frame gen.
