Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 trails Intel Arc B580 and barely beats Radeon RX 7600 in early review

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 is set for release in the second half of July, with prices starting at $249. As with the GeForce RTX 5060, Nvidia has opted not to provide review units to media outlets ahead of launch. However, Quasar Zone managed to obtain an RTX 5050 and benchmarked its performance against popular alternatives.

The GeForce RTX 5050 features 2,560 CUDA cores with boost clocks of up to 2,572 MHz, alongside 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM with a 320 GB/s memory bus. For comparison, the RTX 5060 packs 3,840 CUDA cores, 8 GB of faster GDDR7 VRAM, and a wider 448 GB/s memory bus, meaning it offers 50% more shaders and a 40% more memory bandwidth whilst costing just around 20% more at its starting price of $299. The superior hardware also translates into better real-world performance: Quasar Zone’s testing shows that the RTX 5060 is about 30% faster than the RTX 5050, making the higher-tier model the far better value.

The GeForce RTX 5050 even trailed slightly behind the Intel Arc B580 (approx. $320 on Amazon). Furthermore, the considerably older AMD Radeon RX 7600 is only less than 2% slower than the RTX 5050, whereas last generation’s RTX 4060 outperformed the upcoming entry-level Nvidia card by 7% on average – assuming DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation is disabled. This technology allows the RTX 50 series GPUs to generate three quarters of all frames using artificial intelligence rather than rendering them, potentially allowing for higher frame rates at the cost of higher latency and reduced visual quality.