NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 8 GB

[W1zzard]

NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 5050 is the company’s most affordable Blackwell-based graphics card, priced at $250. That budget-friendly tag comes with some trade-offs: 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM and 2,560 GPU cores. In our review, we’ll find out whether it stands as a true alternative to the RTX 5060 and Radeon RX 9060 XT—or if it's worth spending a little more.

Show full review

 

[Onasi]

For a flat 200 it would actually be a banger card for people on a budget. For 250 it’s a joke and every AIB model that’s over that is an entire circus. No, please, I am sure that this 130 watt GPU absolutely NEEDS a tri-fan solution.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Can't even beat a 4060 a whole generation later noice!!!!!

W1z gonna hurt some of them green Kool-Aid drinkers feelings putting 8GB as a con they view that shid as a pro.

For a flat 200 it would actually be a banger card for people on a budget. For 250 it’s a joke and every AIB model that’s over that is an entire circus. No, please, I am sure that this 130 watt GPU absolutely NEEDS a tri-fan solution.

This card is going to be the SI king there are going to be an army of prebuilts for $900-1200 with this trash in it.

 

[daniel100500]

This should be a sub 200$ card...

 

[Macro Device]

Can't even beat a 4060

I mean, even a 5060 didn't do that convincingly. Now, with only nanocrumbs left, it's surprising 5050 can at least pretend to match 4060.

I expected worse results. Like with any other Blackwell GPU (expected 5090 to be marginally faster than 4090, yet it's a third better; expected 5080 to be in 1% of 4080; expected 5070 Ti to be in 1% of 4070 Ti Super; expected 5070 to always lose against 4070 Ti etc). nVidia, come on, you can do worse!

 

[kiakk]

For a flat 200 it would actually be a banger card for people on a budget. For 250 it’s a joke and every AIB model that’s over that is an entire circus. No, please, I am sure that this 130 watt GPU absolutely NEEDS a tri-fan solution.

More or less I can agree. I would say 170-180USD.

Look at the picture of the teardown. This GPU chip has the same size as only 1 GDDR BGA chip. I do really think, even 200USD could be an overpriced value. But not just for this VGA, for every in the past few years, thanks to last 10 years of 2x mining booms, 1x COVID price boom and the postCovid artifical global infaltion boom.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

I mean, even a 5060 didn't do that convincingly. Now, with only nanocrumbs left, it's surprising 5050 can at least pretend to match 4060.

I expected worse results. Like with any other Blackwell GPU (expected 5090 to be marginally faster than 4090, yet it's a third better; expected 5080 to be in 1% of 4080; expected 5070 Ti to be in 1% of 4070 Ti Super; expected 5070 to always lose against 4070 Ti etc). nVidia, come on, you can do worse!

Lets be real not a single gpu Nvidia released for the 50 series has beaten a gpu one tier above it by a noticeable margin at best some of them came close to matching it. That's just the depressing state of the gpu market in 2025. Maybe the super series will fix that but I am not holding my breath I mean if the 5070 super is decently better and 599 or cheaper I guess that is a win by 2025 standards lol.

people forget the 40 series as a whole wasn't considered that great but at least the majority of the cards jumped a tier in performance.

 

[Macro Device]

Lets be real not a single gpu Nvidia released for the 50 series has beaten a gpu one tier above it by a noticeable margin at best some of them came close to matching it. That's just the depressing state of the gpu market in 2025. Maybe the super series will fix that but I am not holding my breath I mean if the 5070 super is decently better and 599 or cheaper I guess that is a win by 2025 standards lol.

people forget the 40 series as a whole wasn't considered that great but at least the majority of the cards jumped a tier in performance.

Yeah, I agree, everything released this year costs 2x the sane price if not more than that, it's utterly sad and breaks any excitement. And not a single soul (among those with power) does a thing about it. They can make rubbish excuses about production being expensive all they please, it's known for a fact it's not expensive enough to justify selling a microscopic die for over two C-notes.

5050 is just an insult to the injury. Who in the world asked for another one super weak card that still requires additional power from PSU?

It's like those alcoholics who switch to crack of all things. Substituting drinking with something else is good. But...

 

[Legacy-ZA]

It should be on par with a 3070 two generations later, this is just wrong on so many levels.

 

[Tyler-98-W68]

Did the 3050 almost beat the 2060 when it came out? No this is closer to last gen than the 3050 was to the 2060

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Yeah, I agree, everything released this year costs 2x the sane price if not more than that, it's utterly sad and breaks any excitement. And not a single soul (among those with power) does a thing about it. They can make rubbish excuses about production being expensive all they please, it's known for a fact it's not expensive enough to justify selling a microscopic die for over two C-notes.

5050 is just an insult to the injury. Who in the world asked for another one super weak card that still requires additional power from PSU?

It's like those alcoholics who switch to crack of all things. Substituting drinking with something else is good. But...

It's just the reality when one company is hyper focused on AI and the other one just copies their gameplan.

I don't like it but I also don't expect Nvidia/AMD to divert extra silicon to us gamers when they can sell it for 10x-20x in the professional market we can be upset but we also have to be realistic, Nvidia could drop out of the DGPU market tomorrow and they would barely feel it on their earnings report and then AMD would just charge whatever they wanted to because there would be zero competition.

That is actually a worse scenario than what we currently have.

My eyes are already on the 6000/UDNA series of gpu's but I am not holding my breath that they will be much better at least from a price to performance scenario if the 6080 is substantially faster than the 5080 expect a similarly substantial price increase although with the real price of the 5080 being significantly higher in a lot of regions maybe the same price.

 

[adilazimdegilx]

Did the 3050 almost beat the 2060 when it came out? No this is closer to last gen than the 3050 was to the 2060

That's not fair though. Nvidia turned 60 series a joke with 4000s. 2060 was actually a capable mid tier GPU and it was just as fast previous gen 1080. Imagine 4060 or 5060 doing that... This '5050' is neither fast nor more efficient than 4060. It's a failure in every metric.
I dont even know what class this GPU. Considering some ppl here thought that 5060 TI was the low end card when released since 5060 and 5050 did not exist back then. I guess that makes this card ultra extreme low end now...
At least it has adequte vram to that position.

 

[Daven]

On a slightly different note, the performance gap between the 9070XT and 5070TI is indeed smaller than at launch.

 

[_roman_]

First time I read the comments first with the virtual popcorn.
Are there any positive comments?

0.7kg. A new low for a three fan graphic card. A proper card weigths three times as much.

A new record. Two dedicated Heatpipes.

Nice toothpaste what gigabyte used. For sure the best insulating tooth paste available on the cheap market.

edit: Very nice to make a show off card with 3 big fans and than use only 2 heatpipes. I think usual graphic cards have 6 or 8 or 12 heatpipes. Less heatpipes and less copper implies more insulating properties of the graphic card.

LOL - HAHA

I did not read the text. The molding clock implies the backplate is just cheap injection molding material. Not even a proper metal backplate. This also explains the very low 0.7kg of teh hole grahpic card

edit 2: even worse. Toothpaste everywhere where it not belongs. Thermal Toothpaste to "insualte" with the next "most likely" plastic part (backplate most likely).

 

[Dr. Dro]

That's not fair though. Nvidia turned 60 series a joke with 4000s. 2060 was actually a capable mid tier GPU and it was just as fast previous gen 1080. Imagine 4060 or 5060 doing that... This '5050' is neither fast nor more efficient than 4060. It's a failure in every metric.
I dont even know what class this GPU. Considering some ppl here thought that 5060 TI was the low end card when released since 5060 and 5050 did not exist back then. I guess that makes this card ultra extreme low end now...
At least it has adequte vram to that position.

The reintroduction of the Ti moniker and then the further bloating of the stack with Super models caused a shift up in the SKU ladders, to the point the 50 has now assumed the position of the former 30 tier cards. But these aren't built like 30 tier cards anymore, either, which complicates things even more and contribute to the high prices. We now have several Ti and Super models associated with the numbers, and even a certain Ti Super model with both, that's how bad it's gotten. They should really look at a reset the next generation, return the 30, 40, 50 SKUs, make the 60 a true midranger, 70 a true performance segment part, the 80 the enthusiast part... and instead of RTX 6090, bring the Titan branding back, this time without the nonsensical AIB restrictions. It'll make a lot more sense that way.

250 is too much for this, IMO. Flat 200 would have been a lot more honest. Maybe once AMD ships RX 9060 and price pressure increases on and around this segment. The performance is fine for what it is, don't think anyone expected it to be a stellar performer punching like a heavyweight... the gains of >3x over the 3050 in some games, even if it means 10 instead of 3 fps, are quite welcome. Players with low hardware requirements (non-comp eSports) will be happy with this.

First time I read the comments first with the virtual popcorn.
Are there any positive comments?

0.7kg. A new low for a three fan graphic card. A proper card weigths three times as much.

A new record. Two dedicated Heatpipes.

LOL - HAHA

This cooling solution is more than adequate - it's overkill for this product's tiny chip and small TGP. You could slice this by less than half and it'd still be enough surface area to handle it. It'd make the product cheaper, too.

 

[theglaze]

5 years old this December, the GOAT remains:

 

[ThomasK]

My 9500 GT from 17 years ago had a busier PCB than this:

More laughable than this empty board is Gigabyte and other AIBs coming up with 3 fan designs for a GPU that barely needs a single one. Such a waste of copper and aluminum, just to fool the uninformed customer into overpaying for something they don't need.

 

[Macro Device]

6000/UDNA series

Spoiler: NVIDIA release their stuff first. Very expensive, even more extreme shrinkflation, probably worse FPS per $ than in Blackwell. Likely to have other major issues. Stock is barely existent. AMD provide slightly better something per dollar and everything else is worse. And yes, MSRPs will be even more fake.

I can't see what can make this trend stop.

 

[cerulliber]

imho it would be ideal product to be tested with Frame Generation and Ray Tracing/Path Tracing. however, with limited powerhorse this rather testing condition is an rtx 5070 with 16 gb vram or 5060 ti 16gb vram. this make sense only for 1440p imho, because upscaling from 720p to 1080p make no sense. if you get solid 60fps, I'd say it's a great card.
as daily gpu card for office/multimedia no objection if nvidia drivers are mandatory.
I'd say this is the real test for blackwell.

 

[Dr. Dro]

My 9500 GT from 17 years ago had a busier PCB than this:

View attachment 406554

More laughable than this empty board is Gigabyte and other AIBs coming up with 3 fan designs for a GPU that barely needs a single one. Such a waste of copper and aluminum, just to fool the uninformed customer into overpaying for something they don't need.

This doesn't exactly say anything in favor of the 9500 GT over this. Smaller, more tightly integrated always means better when it comes to semiconductors and their boards.

Let's go back even further, the G80 had a huge PCB and even a speaker... what's that got going for it? Poor signal integrity, requiring a huge case, etc

 

[_JP_]

The only thing that makes it an RTX is that 130W consumption, otherwise "Hello, RT 5030! You sure come overpriced for a display adapter.".

 

[Onasi]

The only thing that makes it an RTX is that 130W consumption, otherwise "Hello, RT 5030! You sure come overpriced for a display adapter.".

Okay, let’s not jump off a cliff here, it’s not a fucking glorified display adapter, it’s actually a perfectly viable and decently performant budget card. The issue is, as is always these days, the price. The card itself is fine.

 

[_JP_]

it’s actually a perfectly viable and decently performant budget card. The issue is, as is always these days, the price.

So if the price does not make it "budget", the performance doesn't make it better than the last-gen next-tier, then what is it? "Fine" isn't what I'd call it.

 

[Onasi]

@_JP_
…it’s still budget relative to the rest of the market and NVidias own product stack. It’s replacing the atrocity that was the 3050, which it does successfully. It’s essentially the best overall card in its price class by default because there IS NO competition in said class (yes, I would take it over the B580, before you ask). And the “muh previous gen higher tier” argument is tosh - the 750/750Ti weren’t faster than the 660, yet were still popular cards in their own right. Christ, I understand that nuance is very hard and outrageous claims are edgy and cool and makes one feel tingly in their no-no bits, but please, let’s actually act like tech enthusiasts and not gibbering goblins.

 

[Daven]

Spoiler: NVIDIA release their stuff first. Very expensive, even more extreme shrinkflation, probably worse FPS per $ than in Blackwell. Likely to have other major issues. Stock is barely existent. AMD provide slightly better something per dollar and everything else is worse. And yes, MSRPs will be even more fake.

I can't see what can make this trend stop.

I’m not sure there is enough money in these desktop GPUs for companies going after both data center and client GPUs to care. I think only a new company that just wants to make money off of gaming GPUs can stop the trend.

We need a new 3DFX.