Nvidia has officially launched GeForce RTX 5050 for desktops. Sitting at the bottom of its family tree, this graphics card likely won’t blast away anyone with its performance. However, it will go toe-to-toe with the reigning budget champion, Intel Arc B580, as hits store shelves for the same price.
RTX 5050 will hit the scene in the second half of July, starting at $249. With no Founders Edition design in the works, it’s up to Nvidia board partners to satiate market demand and hit that target price. This release strategy mirrors RTX 5060, RTX 5060 Ti, and RTX 5070 Ti so expect to see a mix of reference and overclocked designs.
Many partners have already revealed their lineups, predominantly consisting of dual fan designs. However, some brands including Asus and Gigabyte are planning triple-fan models, which feels a touch overkill given the 130W TDP of RTX 5050. Regardless of cooler, every RTX 5050 will rock the same GB207 GPU with 2,560 CUDA cores. Stock frequencies for the pixel pusher clock in at 2.31GHz base and 2.57GHz boost but this will be slightly higher on OC variants.
Curiously, RTX 5050 will be the only graphics card in the RTX 50 Series to not use GDDR7 memory modules. Instead, Nvidia is equipping its entry-level offering with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, running on a 128-bit bus. There’s currently no word on the speed of these chips, though, so bandwidth is currently anyone’s guess.
Nvidia has shared performance estimates for RTX 5050, comparing the card against RTX 3050. Though the majority of its frame rates include Frame Generation, there are some titles that promise a noticeable uplift sans the enhancement.
Apex Legends, for example, runs just over 150fps on RTX 3050 but catapults to just shy of 250fps on RTX 5050. Counter-Strike 2 and Overwatch 2 see similar increases in performance. Meanwhile, Fornite, with ray tracing enabled, doesn’t seem as impressive. Of course, independent testing will reveal all.
RTX 5050 needs to present better value than RTX 5060, which doesn’t seem possible given we’re looking at a 33% reduction in CUDA core counts for a 12.5% lower price. Of course, it’ll need to contend with Arc B580 too at its $249 price point and that GPU has a much larger VRAM capacity of 12GB.
Expect to see reviews from outlets hit the web sometime in July. It’s unclear whether Nvidia plans to seed samples but this seems unlikely given it didn’t for RTX 5060. For the moment, stay patient, and wait for independent verdicts before purchasing one.
