The first leaks of RTX 5050 performance have begun popping up on the web, painting a somewhat disappointing picture. While no one is expecting this GPU to be a speed demon, these results don’t make for positive reading either. There are potential reasons for this, such as incomplete driver support, but this is all we have outside of Nvidia’s numbers for the moment.
According to a new FurMark database entry, RTX 5050 accrued 1,978 points or 32fps in the application’s 4K OpenGL test. This unfortunately makes it weaker than the aged RTX 2060, and thus far from the RTX 4060 or Arc B580 it needs to compete with which are closer to the 3,500~ mark.
It’s worth bearing in mind that FurMark isn’t so much a benchmark as it is a torture test for graphics cards. While it can give us a glimpse of GPU performance, it doesn’t replace proper real-world examination. Furthermore, there are some details in this entry that raise more questions than answers.
For starters, these results are while the card is using a 575.89 OpenGL driver. Given that the most-recent publicly available version from Nvidia, at the time of writing, is 576.80, this is almost certainly not the final iteration. Then there’s the chip’s GPU temperature reading of 39°C which is straight up impossible in FurMark.
Another factor likely limiting performance is bandwidth. The Intel Core i7-9700 CPU shouldn’t have any major bearing on a GPU test, but the PCIe 3.0 interface of its platform certainly could. RTX 5050 uses a PCIe 5.0 x8 interface capable of delivering up to 32GB/s of bandwidth, thus, installing it on an older interface would leave it relatively starving.
As I alluded to earlier, no one is expecting RTX 5050 to deliver brilliant levels of performance. However, it certainly needs to be competitive with prior generation offerings and some contemporary ones. Here’s hoping potential further leaks from Chinese consumers can help paint a clearer picture.
