Nvidia Launches Three 5060 Series GPUs. Here’s Why We Think It Could Be a Disaster in the Making
Key Takeaways
- Nvidia has announced three new 5060 series GPUs.
- The 8GB variants aren’t available for third-party reviews, raising suspicion of an underperforming product.
- Nvidia claims 2x faster frame rates once more, which they also did with the 5090 and reviewers found to be patently misleading.
Nvidia just announced the launch of three new graphics cards: the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, and the RTX 5060… which as 12GB but slightly lower frequency, fewer cores and AI TOPS than Ti versions.
Both variants of the RTX 5060 Ti will be available from April 16, whereas the RTX 5060 will come out sometime in May. The RTX 5060 Ti is priced at $429 – the lowest Nvidia has ever gone for a 16GB GPU. This is also about 22% cheaper than the RTX 5070 when it launched at $549.
The 8GB variant of the Ti model is priced at $379, whereas the RTX 5060 will cost $299. This is where things start to get a bit damp.
It’s not obvious to many why anyone would prefer the 8GB variant for just a $50 price difference. This may have been done purposefully to upsell its other 5060 series GPU variants. Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely that consumers will be able to buy an Nvidia GPU at MSRP prices, as retailers will now be assaulted by tariffs and scalpers.
We have another reason for this school of thought. Usually, Nvidia GPU launches are preceded by a full-fledged review schedule, where different reviewers are handed out samples before the official release. However, that’s not the case this time around.
Nvidia seems to have specifically blocked the supply of the 8GB Ti variant for reviews. So, only the 16GB variant will be reviewed by various tech labs. Also, although the official release mentions April 16 as the official release date for both variants, the 8GB version may come out a ‘few weeks’ after the 16GB one.
It seems like Nvidia wants to shift the spotlight to the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and ‘protect’ the 8GB variants from reviewers’ scrutiny and wrath. You’d ask, why the ‘wrath’? Well, despite the slight increase in frequency, tensor cores, and AI TOPS from the non-Ti variant with more VRAM, the 8GB GPU variants likely do not have enough VRAM to handle the requirements of modern games.
This leads to lower texture quality, stuttering, and poor performance. Although you can still play games at 1080p on these GPUs, they aren’t future-proof. This is why industry experts suggest 12GB GPUs.
Nvidia is aware of this. The whole ‘protecting the 8GB variant’ play is being done because they know they’ve likely built a product that will likely be bashed by reviewers, affecting its sales.
Instead, Nvidia wants to push the 16GB variant, get positive reviews on it, and then put the 8GB 5060 GPUs on the store shelves without much fuss. Now, innocent buyers who are oblivious to the specifications may end up buying the 8GB versions since they’re cheaper, only to find they’re getting less gaming performance than they thought they would.
Performance
Performance-wise, the Nvidia says the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPU will offer the best value for gamers. It’s 20% faster than the RTX 4060 Ti and 30% faster than the 3060 Ti variant. Plus, after adjusting for inflation, it they say it will offer 15-20% lower cost per frame than the RTX 4070 and is 33% cheaper than the RTX 3060 Ti.
The 8GB Ti variant is claimed to similar core performance. However, less VRAM is a significant bottleneck that can affect performance on various modern games. That said, we know Nvidia tends to skew its first-party benchmarks to be as appealing as possible.
The RTX 5060 is also claimed to be 20-25% faster than the RTX 4060 and 30% faster than the RTX 3060, with a 40% lower cost per frame. This is not necessarily the case though, as the data has to be verified by third-party reviewers. Plus, the VRAM drops from 12GB on the RTX 3060 to 8GB on the RTX 5060, which makes it an overpriced GPU at this price.
Nvidia’s Marketing Gimmick
In addition to the review and price blunder Nvidia has made with this launch, another laughable marketing gimmick is going around.
Nvidia claims that the new 50 series GPUs offer 2x the frame rates of the previous models. Good, right? Nope. Nvidia has, very smartly, used the words ‘frame rate’ instead of ‘performance.’ And even in doing so, the numbers are way off.
The official launch page says that the frame rate on the 5060 Ti is 171 compared to the 4060 Ti’s 87, and the latency is down from 48 to 47.
However, if you look at the small font of caveat at the bottom (something you may need a microscope for), it says that this performance was achieved on DLSS Quality Mode and by using the max frame gen level supported by each GPU.
As you might already know, DLSS uses AI to upscale a lower-res image to make it look like a higher-res one. So, Nvidia claims that Wukong runs at 102 FPS in the new GPU. However, in reality, the render rate is below 30 FPS, and the remainder are… AI generated frames – this is where we all facepalm.
This also isn’t the first time Nvidia has tried to mislead users. They had earlier said that the 5090 GPU variants would render twice the performance of the 4090 series, which was never the case across the board, only in very specific scenarios.
That’s all we could muster from the one-page official Nvidia release, and it isn’t looking like a great release for what is the ‘leading AI chip manufacturer.’ So far, the 50 series tells us the company doesn’t care about gamers as much, since the bulk of their profit comes from B2B sales. We’ll have to wait for all the GPUs to hit the stores and see how they perform in real-world settings, so, if you’re looking to upgrade your GPU soon, we urge extreme caution until trusted, third-party reviewers can confirm real-world performance.
Krishi is a seasoned tech journalist with over four years of experience writing about PC hardware, consumer technology, and artificial intelligence.
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