Nvidia's New RTX 5050: A Budget-Friendly GPU with a Catch

Nvidia has rolled out its latest GeForce RTX 5050 GPUs, designed for both desktops and laptops. These new graphics cards come with support for ray tracing and DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation. The desktop version of the RTX 5050 starts at $249 and features 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which is a bit outdated compared to the latest tech. It also has 2, 560 Blackwell CUDA cores and can draw up to 130W of power. Third-party manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI will produce these cards, with shipments expected in the second half of July. For laptops, the RTX 5050 is more power-efficient, drawing between 35W and 100W. It uses 8GB of GDDR7 VRAM, which is more power-efficient than GDDR6, allowing for slimmer and cooler laptops. Laptops with this GPU will start at $999, with some models available from today. Early models will have pre-installed drivers for the 5050 GPU, as Nvidia's Game Ready Drivers are set to release in early July. The choice of GDDR6 for the desktop version is a bit puzzling. While it should outperform the laptop version with GDDR7, the desktop RTX 5050 matches the RTX 5060 in terms of VRAM but lags behind in performance due to fewer CUDA cores. This means there will be a noticeable performance gap between the RTX 5050 and the more powerful RTX 5060. Nvidia claims that the RTX 5050 can deliver an immersive ray-traced experience in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Avowed, thanks to DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation. However, these claims come with a catch. The impressive performance figures were achieved when paired with a high-end AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU at a 1080p resolution. In full raster mode, Nvidia claims the RTX 5050 is about 60 percent faster than the older RTX 3050.