The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 might have had a questionable price for its spec when it came out, but this budget gaming GPU makes a lot more sense at its current price on Amazon. Right now, you can save 15% off the usual price of an MSI Shadow RTX 5050 card, making it just £186.96, which should arguably have been this GPU’s MSRP in the first place.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050
“Fills a corner of the market that’s otherwise starving.” Read our review.
As we established in our Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 review, this entry-level GPU covers the basics if you want to build a budget gaming rig, it just had an unappealing price when it launched. Based on Nvidia’s latest Blackwell architecture, it supports all the company’s latest DLSS 4 tech, including multi-frame gen, although we don’t recommend using the latter unless you have a solid frame rate in the first place. It also gives you 2,560 CUDA cores to power through the latest games at reasonable settings, as long as you don’t push your luck.
It only has 8GB of VRAM, which limits the potential of higher-end GPUs, such as the RTX 5060 and Radeon RX 9060 XT, meaning some settings are out of reach. However, 8GB is fair on a budget graphics card where you’re not expected to push above 1920×1080, as long as the price is right. The problem is that the £220 / $249 MSRP wasn’t right, but this current £186.96 price is much more palatable.
As you can see in our benchmark results above, the RTX 5050 can achieve decent playable frame rates in titles such as Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. It’s often not far off the pace of the last-gen RTX 4060, and it’s well ahead of the RTX 3050 if you’re still rocking one of these entry-level Ampere graphics cards. It’s sometimes outperformed by the Intel Arc B580, but these GPUs usually go for over £250, thanks to short supply.
If you don’t have much money to spend, but you’re looking to upgrade to a half-decent GPU without breaking the bank, then we’d advise taking advantage of this deal now. It’s a seriously low price for an RTX 5050 card, and it’s looking increasingly likely that GPU prices are about to go up in the near future, thanks to the sky-high demand for DRAM chips to power the AI boom.
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