Nvidia’s entry-level RTX 5050 is coming in late July with a recommended retail price of $250. Although Nvidia has struggled to keep its RTX 50-series cards in stock at fair prices, its RTX 5060 is relatively well available at MSRP, so it’s possible the RTX 5050 will have strong availability at its intended price. Even then, though, it may struggle to compete with older GPUs that are equally affordable.
The official Nvidia line from its new launch page is that the RTX 5050 will be available in the “second half of July,” and will start at $249. There will no doubt be more expensive third-party options, but light overclocks aren’t going to do much for a card with a mere 2,560 CUDA cores. That’s the same core count as the RTX 4050 and 3050, though this model does have 8GB of GDDR6, where the 4050 and some 3050s only had 6GB.
While that’s welcome, it’s still not much of an upgrade. VRAM demands from modern games are starting to eclipse 8GB for anything outside the lowest settings, so though this card isn’t designed for high-end gaming, it’s not going to be able to offer much when it comes to the latest games. Indeed, its 2,560 CUDA core count is a 33% drop off from the RTX 5060’s 3,840. Although the slightly higher clock speed should help prevent it from being a linear performance drop, even a 20% decrease in capabilities there would put this card in the same performance bracket as the RX 6600 and Intel A750.
Credit: Nvidia
Indeed, that could be a problem for this card, as at around the $250 price tag, you can also find the aforementioned cards, as well as the RX 7600, and the B570 (which has 10GB of VRAM). The RTX 5050 could be the first card of its generation to face genuine price and performance competition from its predecessors. To date, poor availability of new cards has meant most older GPUs have been sold out too.
One area where this card will perform far better than those alternatives, however, is in games with ray tracing. The latest generation RT cores in the RTX 50 series are very impressive, so even with its weak performance, you might be able to turn on some light RT effects in certain low-demand games with this GPU. Assuming the VRAM doesn’t hold you back. DLSS will do a lot of heavy lifting to keep frame rates up. If you can get your base FPS high enough to avoid the worst side effects, multi-frame generation will boost FPS well beyond what those older cards can manage in compatible games.
The question now becomes whether Nvidia will actually let this card out before launch day. It courted controversy with the launch of the RTX 5060 Ti when it didn’t send out samples of the 8GB version of the card and made it hard for reviewers to test the RTX 5060 ahead of going on sale.