If it weren’t for its limited memory, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 would be a decent 1080p gaming GPU, with solid rendering performance that’s close to the RTX 4060 Ti and a fair bit quicker than the 4060. As it is, however, the 5060’s lack of VRAM means it already struggles with some games, and will find it harder to run more demanding titles in the future.
Pros
Similar performance to RTX 4060 Ti
Cheaper than other RTX 5000 GPUs
Multi frame gen
Cons
Not enough VRAM
Overpriced for an 8GB card
Not all games multi frame gen
I almost feel a bit sorry for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060. My review has been delayed because Nvidia decided not to release a press driver so I could test it before release, and there's now a very obvious reason why. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 still only has 8GB of VRAM, and that's proving to be a major restriction on its capabilities. It's a baffling decision that means the RTX 5060 falls over in one of our test games if you run it above the Medium graphics preset, even at 1,920 x 1,080.
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Specs
RTX 5060 specs
CUDA cores
3,840
RT cores
30
Tensor cores
120
Base clock
2.28GHz
Boost clock
2.5GHz
L2 cache
24MB
ROPs
48
VRAM
8GB GDDR7 28Gbps
Memory interface
128-bit
Memory bandwidth
448GB/s
Interface
8x PCIe 5.0
Power connectors
1 x 8-pin
Total graphics power
145W
If we ignore the VRAM elephant in the room for the moment, the RTX 5060 has a solid uplift in specs compared to the RTX 4060. The new GPU contains 3,840 CUDA cores, which are the tiny processors that work in parallel to render your games. As a general rule, the more the better when it comes to CUDA cores, and the RTX 5060 has a solid 25% more than the RTX 4060, which only has 3,072 of them, meaning it should be significantly quicker when it comes to raw frame rates.
Meanwhile, the RTX 5060's 30 RT cores will make this budget gaming GPU better at handling ray tracing than the 24 in the RTX 4060, especially as they're also based on the new and improved Blackwell architecture. There are also 120 Tensor cores for AI workloads, such as DLSS upscaling and frame gen, as well as new neural rendering techniques such as neural radiance cache. Again, that's a decent step up from the 96 found in the RTX 4060.
Nvidia has also furnished its latest Tensor cores with the ability to run its multi-frame gen tech, which uses AI to insert up to three extra frames between each pair of frames genuinely rendered by the GPU. In my tests, I've found that this tech can't fix a low frame rate – if your game is running at 15fps, then using multi-frame gen to boost that to 50fps will still be horrible to play. However, if your game is already running at 60fps, multi-frame gen can be a useful tool in your GPU's arsenal to boost that figure to around 200fps, smoothing out the motion if you have a monitor with a high refresh rate.
Then we come to the RTX 5060's big stumbling block, which is the VRAM. On the plus side, it uses fast GDDR7 memory running at 1,750MHz (28Gbps effective), which results in a peak memory bandwidth figure of 448GB/s with the card's 128-bit bus. That basically means the GPU can retrieve data from the VRAM remarkably quickly for a card at this price – as a point of comparison, the RTX 4060's total memory bandwidth is just 272GB/s, so the RTX 5060's memory system is significantly faster.
That's where the good news ends, though, because the big problem is that there's only 8GB of this fast memory on this card. That's the same capacity as the RTX 4060 before it, and even less than the 12GB RTX 3060 that came out several years ago. As a result, many of our test games showed us VRAM warnings in the graphics settings during testing, even when running some of the games at 1080p, some games would clearly be quicker with more memory, and some games just flat-out turned into a horrible stuttering mess.
You can see how Nvidia ended up in this situation. After all, 12GB of the latest GDDR7 VRAM tech is going to bump up the price, and the yields on new 3GB GDDR7 chips are probably nowhere near high enough to make a mass-produced graphics card based on them yet. That means Nvidia needs to use 2GB chips at the moment, and the structure of the RTX 5060 gives it a 128-bit bus, which means it can either have 8GB or 16GB of VRAM made with standard 2GB chips – 16GB would be too expensive, so we've ended up with an 8GB card.
Arguably, Nvidia would have been better off having a different layout for this chip, with a 192-bit bus allowing for a 12GB setup, or even just a 160-bit bus allowing for 10GB – I'd argue that just using more GDDR6 memory would have been better than using less GDDR7 RAM. As it is, though, the RTX 5060 has really fast memory, but not enough of it, which puts it in a difficult competitive position against the $349 AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB, if it's actually available at that price.
Another area where the Radeon RX 9060 XT has an advantage is the PCIe interface, as it uses the full 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes, while the RTX 5060 only uses eight of them. That's plenty of bandwidth if you're using a PCIe 5.0 motherboard, but it means you'll still only get eight lanes if you put this GPU in a PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 motherboard, perhaps if you're upgrading an Intel 10th-gen Comet Lake system, for example, which only s PCIe 3.0, and using just eight PCIe 3.0 lanes is likely to start restricting performance of this GPU.
Finally, I'm pleased to see that the RTX 5060 still only requires a single 8-pin power connector, meaning it will work fine with most people's existing PSUs, with the total graphics power rated at just 145W. That means you'll be fine running this GPU with a standard 500-550W PSU.
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5060 Gaming OC
Nvidia isn't making its own RTX 5060 Founders Edition card, which means all 5060 cards are made by third-party board partners. Gigabyte sent me its GeForce RTX 5060 Gaming OC card for this review, which keeps remarkably quiet with its three fans spinning at low speeds, and also tightly squeezes into just two slots.
Gigabyte has also given its card a small overclock of 95MHz, which takes the boost clock from 2.5GHz to 2.9GHz. As such, bear in mind that our benchmark results will be very slightly quicker than those of a stock speed card, though the difference will be very small (only 1-2fps here and there).
There's also a large metal backplate on the rear of the card, which doesn't make a direct connection with any of the silicon, but does help prevent the card from sagging, and the RTX 5060 doesn't run particularly hot anyway. Meanwhile, a large cutout on the right of the backplate allows hot air to be pushed straight through the top of the card in a standard case configuration, where your case's fans can then push it out the back.
It's a big beast for a budget gaming GPU, but it was also exceptionally quiet during testing, and you also get a bit of RGB lighting on the right-hand side of the top edge, beneath the Gigabyte logo. One other interesting part of the design is the positioning of the 8-pin power connector on the far left of the card. This can make for tidy cable routing if your case has a routing hole for your motherboard's front audio header, but it can look a bit messy if you're dragging cables over from the right.
How we test
To assess the gaming performance of the GeForce RTX 5060, I'm running a number of benchmarks using real games, rather than synthetic benchmarks. Each test is run three times, recorded with Nvidia FrameView, and I report the mean average of the results, discarding any obvious anomalies. I report two figures for frame rates – firstly, the average, which gives you an idea of the general frame rate you will achieve. Secondly, I report the 1% low, which is an average of the lowest one percent of results recorded during the benchmark.
The latter is a more reliable indicator of performance than the outright minimum, as it removes outliers, such as moments where a Windows system event causes the game to stutter, which is unrelated to the performance of the GPU. The 1% low is what you can expect the actual typical minimum frame rate to be in these games.
I'm also now reporting the latency in GPU reviews, which is expressed in milliseconds (ms), and refers to the delay between an action being executed in a game and that action being displayed by your graphics card – the lower the latency, the more responsive your game will feel in action. These figures aren't always featured in the graphs, as I don't have the data for all the other GPUs, but they're discussed in the review.
GPU test system specs:
U: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
U cooler: Corsair H100X RGB Elite
Memory: 32GB 6,000MHz G.Skill TridentZ RGB, CL28
Motherboard: MSI MAG X870E Carbon WiFi
SSD: 2TB WD Black SN850X
PSU: Corsair RM1000X Shift
Benchmarks
Doom The Dark Ages
I'm going to kick off the RTX 5060 benchmarks with a look at a great showcase title for this new budget gaming GPU, Doom The Dark Ages. The latest hellscape shooter from id features loads of cool ray tracing tech, as well as implementing full for Nvidia DLSS 4, including multi-frame gen. I ran the new game on the RTX 5060 at various settings, and it coped remarkably well with them.
Even without any help from DLSS, the RTX 5060 can cope with this game at 1080p using the Ultra Nightmare preset, where it averages 70fps, with the 1% low dropping to 54fps. Enable DLSS 4 on the Quality setting, and these figures go up to 93fps and 75fps respectively, plus the game still looks really good at these settings, thanks to the new DLSS 4 Transformer model, which makes for stable motion and much less blurriness than DLSS 3.
That 93fps average is also a solid enough foundation to enable frame gen, meaning the RTX 5060 can spread its AI wings and soar to an average of 238fps. Impressively, while enabling multi frame gen does increase input lag, this game's for Nvidia Reflex means the impact is minimal – I measured the input latency at 24ms without multi frame gen, and 35ms with it, and the game was perfectly fine with frame gen enabled during gameplay, with the action looking super smooth.
However, if you then up the settings to 2,560 x 1,440, you already start to bump up against the VRAM limitation, with the memory usage turning red in the graphics menu. You can run the game reasonably well at 1440p with DLSS on the Quality setting, where it averages 66fps with 31ms latency.
However, enabling frame gen at these settings saturates the VRAM, with the latency going up to 74ms. While the average frame rate of 92fps looks higher with frame gen enabled, the game was actually unplayable in action, with occasional stuttering and sudden acceleration as the frame rate caught up. If you're only gaming at 1080p, though, the RTX 5060 handles this game really well.
Cyberpunk 2077
Another good showcase for the RTX 5060 is Cyberpunk 2077, which again s all the latest Nvidia DLSS 4 tech, and looks fantastic on the new GPU. If you run the game with the Ultra ray tracing preset at 1080p, you can see that the RTX 5060's 45fps average is significantly quicker than the 37fps from the RTX 4060, and only 3fps behind the RTX 4060 Ti.
It's still not playable at these settings, but setting DLSS upscaling to Balanced (which still looks solid with the new Transformer model), pushes this up to 85fps, with a 68fps 1% low, which is a solid enough. You can then enable 4x multi-frame gen, and the game averages 231fps with a 126fps 1% low – the game looks fantastic at these settings, and it's smooth as well. There is an increase in latency here, going from 26ms to 40ms, but I found the game was still responsive enough to play in action.
I then had a go at enabling path tracing using the Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive mode, just to see if this new budget GPU could cope with the intensive demands of this ray tracing technique. You need to engage DLSS to get a decent frame rate, of course, but if you enable upscaling on the Performance setting (which, again, doesn't look terrible anymore, thanks to the new Transformer model), the game averages 66fps with a 50fps 1% low and 31ms latency.
If you then enable multi-frame gen, the average frame rate goes up to 202fps, but the 1% low is just 70fps, and the latency increases to 46ms. In action, I found the game occasionally stuttered with frame gen enabled here, with sudden fast movements occurring when the frame rate caught up again. Basically, path tracing is technically possible on this GPU, but I wouldn't recommend it, even if you throw all the DLSS magic Nvidia can muster at it.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Now for the big fly in the RTX 5060 ointment, a super-demanding game that makes the RTX 5060 struggle, simply because it doesn't have enough VRAM to cope with it. This game has two tiers of settings – the standard one ranges from Low to Supreme and has ray tracing as standard, and you can then also engage a further tier of Full RT settings at various levels to enable path tracing features.
As standard, I run this game at the Ultra preset with no path tracing on all GPUs, as it still looks really good at these settings, and most GPUs can cope with it. The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, for example, averages a smooth 91fps in this game at these settings, with a 1% low of 72fps.
However, 8GB of VRAM simply isn't enough to cope with this preset, with the RTX 5060's performance falling off a cliff edge – the average was just 23fps, and the 1% low dropped right down to 9fps – it's completely unplayable. Even dropping to the next setting down (High) pushed this GPU's memory to the limit, with a 41fps average and stuttery 1% low of 13fps. You also still get a warning about not having enough VRAM if you drop down to the Medium setting, but I found the card could still run the game using this preset, averaging 92fps with a 71fps 1% low.
In the end, you have to drop down to the Low preset to stop getting VRAM warnings in the graphics menu, where the RTX 5060 averages 110fps. That's a decent frame rate, but while the game still looks OK at these settings, it's clear that a bit more memory would enable you to run this game with much more detail and eye candy on the RTX 5060.
Call of Duty Black Ops 6
Next up is Call of Duty Black Ops 6, a AAA shooter that doesn't feature any ray tracing tech, and also doesn't multi-frame gen. This test gives us a good indication of a GPU's raw rendering capabilities, although it does generally prefer AMD's GPU architectures to those of Nvidia. As a case in point, this is the only game in our test suite where the aging Radeon RX 7600 is faster than the RTX 5060.
Even so, the difference is marginal, and the RTX 5060 can clearly cope with this game fine at 1080p, even when it's maxed out with no DLSS. Its average of 94fps and 68fps 1% low is fine, with the former being a good 12fps quicker than the RTX 4060. If you then enable DLSS on the Quality setting, the average frame rate goes up to 100fps, and the latency remains the same, averaging around the 22ms mark.
You can also then enable frame gen, allowing the average frame rate to pull away to 147fps, although the latency then goes up a little to 32ms. However, the 1% low was surprisingly low here at 69fps, particularly at the start of the benchmark. If you're playing this game on the RTX 5060, I'd avoid enabling frame gen and just stick with DLSS on the Quality setting with the Extreme preset or, even better, drop down to lower graphics settings.
While the RTX 5060 can cope with Black Ops 6 at 1080p, the graphics menu flags up a red VRAM warning when you up the resolution to 2,560 x 1,440 with the Extreme preset. It's still playable, despite this, averaging 68fps, with the scope for a higher frame rate if you enable DLSS or drop the settings, but this does again show that this card is right up against it when it comes to memory. Enabling frame gen at this resolution pushes the average up to 104fps, but the 1% low still stumbles at 50fps, and the latency goes right up to 45ms – your best bet is to run this game at 1080p if you're using the RTX 5060.
F1 24
While we wait for F1 25 to come out, we're currently still testing with F1 24, which is still a great benchmark with its fast pace and gorgeous ray tracing effects at the Ultra preset. This benchmark also really shows the increase in rendering power you get from stepping up from the RTX 4060 to the 5060. The former averages 53fps with a 38fps 1% low at 1080p, but the RTX 5060 takes the average all the way up to 72fps. That puts the average on a par with the RTX 4060 Ti, and the 1% low on the RTX 5060 was actually faster than the 4060 Ti at 56fps.
That's already playable without any help from DLSS, but you can get some more performance from the RTX 5060 if you enable DLSS upscaling on the Quality setting and enable frame gen too. This pushes the average right up to 120fps with a 74fps 1% low – a great result, and with only a modest increase in latency from 35ms to 38ms. Comparatively, I couldn't even get the Radeon RX 7600 to run this game with FSR upscaling and frame gen enabled, as it kept falling over.
Moving up to 1440p is a bit much for the RTX 5060 at these settings, though, where it averages just 48fps with a clunky 1% low of 34fps, and high input latency of 52ms. As with most of the above tests, 1080p is definitely the sweet spot for the RTX 5060 if you're running games at high settings.
Doom Eternal
Finally, our aging Doom Eternal benchmark is still a good test of the latest GPUs, particularly if you enable ray tracing. Even at 1080p, maxing out this game with the Ultra Nightmare settings with ray tracing pushes the VRAM really hard, but can give you great results if the GPU is up to the job. I've seen several 8GB cards fall over in this test, including the RTX 4060, so I was intrigued to see how the RTX 5060 coped.
Remarkably, the RTX 5060 managed to clock up a 185fps average at these settings, with a 96fps 1% low, offering similar performance to the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB. However, you can see from the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB result that the extra VRAM really enables this GPU to pull away by a huge margin, despite only having a modest amount of extra GPU power.
Disable ray tracing, however, and the RTX 5060 can really churn out the frame rates in this old game, with its 336fps average at 1080p being 31fps in front of the RTX 4060, and its 247fps average at 1440p being a decent result too.
Power draw
One area where the RTX 5060 really excels is power draw, with our Ryzen 7 7800X3D test rig only drawing a peak of 274W from the mains with the RTX 5060 running at full load. Again, that's a similar result to the RTX 4060 Ti, and only marginally higher than the Radeon RX 7600 – a difference that would very probably disappear if you were using a stock speed version of the card, rather than our overclocked one.
I'll be interested to see the power draw of the Radeon RX 9060 XT in comparison, but given the relatively high power consumption of the Radeon RX 9070 cards, this is a battle that may end up being won by the RTX 5060. It may only have 8GB of VRAM, but most PC gamers will easily be able to this card without needing to buy a new PSU.
Price
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 price is $299, which matches the price of its predecessor, the RTX 4060, while overclocked versions, such as the Gigabyte Gaming OC card we tested, cost a little extra. At face value, the price doesn't look too bad, given that the new GPU offers a solid improvement in rendering performance over its predecessor.
However, at this price, this GPU really needs more than 8GB of VRAM now, especially when the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB is lined up to cost $349. We'll have to see how real-world prices look once all the GPUs have been released and the prices have settled down, but $299 is too expensive for a GPU with this level of performance and memory in 2025, even if it is better than its predecessor.
Alternatives
AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT
AMD's competing GPU may not be out yet, but the Radeon RX 9060 XT release date is coming very soon, and I advise holding off on purchasing the RTX 5060 before you know how this new AMD GPU performs. Two versions will be available, with AMD saying the 8GB card will have the same price as the RTX 5060, with the 16GB card costing a very reasonable $349 at MSRP. It's likely that the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB will be a much better buy than the RTX 5060, but only if AMD's pricing holds up in the real world, which hasn't been the case with the 9070 cards so far.
Intel Arc B580
This Intel Battlemage GPU has one major benefit over the RTX 5060, which is an extra 4GB of VRAM, giving it a total of 12GB. This gives it much more headroom to run the latest games at high settings without completely falling over, although Intel's ing suite of AI tech is a fair way behind Nvidia DLSS when it comes to game . Thanks to scarce supply, however, Intel Arc B580 prices are all over the place, particularly in the US. At its $259 MSRP, the Arc B580 is a good buy, but it makes less sense when it costs over $300.
Verdict
Oh, Nvidia, why do you do this to us? You give us a decent boost in rendering performance for the same price as your old card, but then you only give it 8GB of VRAM on a $299 card in 2025 – it's like building a nice house, then making all the doors not quite big enough to avoid scraping your butt and bashing your head. Nvidia could have definitely made a better offering here, perhaps using a wider bus and 12GB of VRAM, even if it wasn't GDDR7 memory. I'd also be surprised if we didn't see a 12GB RTX 5060 Super coming out next year, using 3GB GDDR7 chips.
It's unfortunate in the meantime, though, because there are other areas where the RTX 5060 is a decent GPU. Its rendering and ray tracing performance is a fair bit quicker than the RTX 4060, and not far off the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, which isn't bad for the $299 asking price. Even at this level, multi frame gen can still be a useful tool as well – you just need to make sure your starting frame rate is high enough, and you can then enjoy super-smooth frame rates in games that it – in particular, Doom The Dark Ages and Cyberpunk 2077 run well on this new GPU with DLSS 4.
But then we have other games, such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, that fall over if you go above the Medium graphics preset, even at 1080p, and several of our test games gave us warnings about VRAM capacity in the graphics menu as we increased the settings. To be fair, this card did still run most of our test games at 1,920 x 1,080 with its 8GB of VRAM, but a lot of them were right on the limit, which raises questions about future proofing and the lifespan of this GPU.
I also advise waiting for our AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT review before purchasing the RTX 5060, as the 16GB version of this graphics card could well turn out to be a better buy, but only if real-world pricing doesn't spiral out of control. In the meantime, the RTX 5060 isn't a terrible $299 gaming GPU, but it could have been made so much better if Nvidia addressed its one major flaw.
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