MSI GeForce RTX 5050 Shadow 2X Review: Budget Blackwell Gaming Tested
Our Test System Configuration:
| Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (4.7GHz - 5.2GHz, 8-Core) MSI X870E Carbon WiFi 32GB G.SKILL DDR5-6000 Samsung SSD 990 Integrated Audio / Network Radeon RX 7700 XT Radeon RX 7600 XT Radeon RX 9060 XT GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GeForce RTX 5060 GeForce RTX 5050 Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 24H2 AMD Radeon v24.12.1 NVIDIA Drivers v575.94 / v576.52 |
Benchmarks Used: MLPerf Client Geekbench AI Procyon AI Text Generation Procyon AI Stable Diffusion XL Blender v4.3 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v4.3.1 V-Ray UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition Games Tested: Assassin's Creed Mirage Black Myth Wukong Homeworld 3 Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Cyberpunk 2077 The Talos Principle II F1 24 |
MLPerf Client Benchmarks
The MLPerf Client benchmark was designed by MLCommons to evaluate machine learning inference tasks on PCs. It focuses on client form factors and aims to measure how well different hardware and software configurations handle four different AI workloads using a single model. It supports DirectML via ONNX Runtime for a wide range of hardware, but Intel also gets a specialized OpenVINO path for now. Participants in MLCommons are also able to optimize the models for their hardware, but must meet strict guidelines for accuracy.
The GeForce RTX 5050 lands in the middle of the stack in terms of latency (time to first token), and punches above its weight class. Average second token rate, however, pushed the card down just behind the Radeon RX 7600 XT.
Geekbench AI Testing
Geekbench AI is a cross-platform benchmark tool designed to evaluate the performance of AI workloads on a wide range devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. It measures the performance of CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs (Neural Processing Units) across different operating systems like Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux with an array of machine learning tasks.
The chart above is sorted based on the quantized score. Here, the GeForce RTX 5050 outpaces the previous-gen RTX 30 series cards (though the RTX 3070 Ti pulls ahead with single precision), but the GeForce RTX 5050 obviously isn't catching the higher-end GeForces.
The chart above is sorted based on the quantized score. Here, the GeForce RTX 5050 outpaces the previous-gen RTX 30 series cards (though the RTX 3070 Ti pulls ahead with single precision), but the GeForce RTX 5050 obviously isn't catching the higher-end GeForces.
UL Procyon AI Text Generation Benchmarks
The Procyon AI Text Generation Benchmark is a tool developed by UL Solutions to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) on Windows PCs. It features real-world use cases and uses seven prompts with both Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and non-RAG queries. It tests various AI models like Phi-3.5-mini, Mistral-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Llama-2-13B. These tests were run using ONNX with DirectML, not TensorRT, which is optimal for NVIDIA's RTX series discrete GPUs, but unavailable in this test at this time with this particular test.
Once again we see the GeForce RTX 5050 landing roughly in the middle of the group of GPUs we tested. For text generation, at least with the models and frameworks used with the Procyon benchmarks, the GeForce RTX 5050 once again punches above its weight.
Once again we see the GeForce RTX 5050 landing roughly in the middle of the group of GPUs we tested. For text generation, at least with the models and frameworks used with the Procyon benchmarks, the GeForce RTX 5050 once again punches above its weight.
UL Procyon Stable Diffusion XL AI Image Generation
The Procyon AI Image Generation Benchmark measures inference performance for image generation tasks. It includes several tests, with the Stable Diffusion XL (FP16) test we used here being the most demanding. The test is designed to evaluate a wide range of hardware from low power NPUs to high-end discrete GPUs and it can be configured to use different inference engines like NVIDIA TensorRT, Intel OpenVINO, and ONNX with DirectML. Unfortunately, the TensorRT engine hasn’t been updated for Blackwell just yet, but we tested it with ONNX to provide a point of reference versus the RTX 40 series cards.
With Procyon's Stable Diffusion XL image generation test, the GeForce RTX 5050 slots in below the RTX 5060, as you would expect, but it's dangerously close to the more expensive Radeon RX 9600 XT and outruns the Radeon RX 7000 series cards, no problem. There's no GeForce RTX 3050 represented here because it was unable to properly complete the benchmark due to its 6GB of memory and relatively low performing GPU.
Blender v4.3 GPU Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, and animation, through simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and even video editing or game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmark tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...
The GeForce RTX 5050 performs relatively well in Blender. Thanks to Blender's support for NVIDIA's RT cores and hardware-accelerated ray tracing with OptiX, the GeForce RTX 5050 easily outruns all of the Radeons we tested and hangs with some of the higher-end GeForces.
V-Ray Rendering
The V-Ray Benchmark is a free tool that measures rendering performance on CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, or a combination of both. The GPU benchmark in particular features a complex scene designed to evaluate the capabilities of both the RTX and CUDA-based V-Ray 6 render engines.
The GeForce RTX 5050 can't quite catch the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, but it nearly triples the performance of the GeForce RTX 3050. Radeons aren't supported in this benchmark, hence their omission from the chart.
Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that determines the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW video frames. The tool can be used to evaluate performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL or CUDA on a GPU. We're reporting four results here, at 8K and 4K resolutions, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.
At both resolutions and compression levels, the GeForce RTX 5050 lands just behind the RTX 5060, up near the top of the chart. For this particular image decoding workload, the GeForce RTX 5050 performs much better than most previous-gen GPUs thanks to its updated, more capable media engine.
