Conclusion

With the new GeForce RTX 50-series Blackwell, NVIDIA modernized many I/O features of its GPUs. It has extended the ATX 3.1 power architecture to more of its product stack, many of the custom RTX 5060 Ti cards we've reviewed come with a 16-pin 12V-2x6 power connector. It's also brought the latest GDDR7 memory standard to the xx60 SKUs, and most notably, it has standardized PCI-Express 5.0 for the host interface. What changed between the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Ampere and the RTX 4060 Ti Ada was that NVIDIA narrowed the PCIe bus from Gen 4 x16 to Gen 4 x8, which was a cause of some concern, given that back in 2022 there were still plenty of PCIe Gen 3 platforms. With the new GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, NVIDIA has upgraded the PCIe bus to Gen 5 x8, giving it twice the PCIe bandwidth the RTX 4060 Ti enjoyed. There's still the lingering doubt about what would happen if the RTX 5060 Ti is used on a system that only supports Gen 4 PCIe—there are plenty such platforms, as entry-level and mid-range motherboards based on even the latest processor generations only offer Gen 4 PEG slots.

x8 4.0
We are thrilled to report that running the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti with PCI-Express 4.0 x8 has an insignificant impact on performance. Averaged across all game tests, we see a 2% drop in FPS at 1080p, and an even smaller 1% drop at 1440p. While not exactly relevant to this GPU, even 4K Ultra HD posts only a 1% drop in performance with PCIe Gen 4 x8. This should be fantastic news for everyone who has the latest processors (Intel 12th Gen or later, AMD Ryzen 5000 or later), but with a motherboard that only supports Gen 4 on the main x16 PEG slot. There aren't really any outliers to report where the lack of Gen 5 puts the RTX 5060 Ti at a disadvantage. So, for those of you on mid-range chipsets such as the AMD B650 or Intel B660, rejoice.

x8 3.0
The next data point is Gen 3 x8. This would be applicable for those using an older processor or APU that only puts out Gen 3 PCIe, but one that's fairly recent. A good example of this would be the Ryzen 5000G Cezanne, which can be used on Gen 4-capable AMD 500-series chipset motherboards, but the CPU itself only has a Gen 3-capable PCIe root. Other examples would be Intel 10th Gen Core Comet Lake on Intel 500-series chipset motherboards. Here, the RTX 5060 Ti posts a 4% loss in performance averaged across all game tests. This is an acceptable level of performance loss, all things considered, and should give confidence to those on older platforms.

Ray Tracing, DLSS, and Frame Generation
The above trends also hold with ray tracing. Gen 4 x8 loses 2% performance averaged across all tests at 1080p, and about 5% with Gen 3 x8. Although small, the 5% performance loss could pinch a little, considering that ray tracing imposes its own performance cost on the overall performance of the game.

Closing Thoughts
A mid-range performance-segment GPU like the RTX 5060 Ti should be affected much less from changes in host interface bandwidth than a high-end GPU like the RTX 5090, and that much is evident from our testing. The RTX 5060 Ti isn't all that faster than the RTX 4060 Ti to begin with, and so it was natural for Gen 4 x8 and Gen 3 x8 to post only marginal drops in performance, which become a bit more pronounced in ray tracing tests, where the overall cost of ray tracing weighs in. That said, it's worth noting that while we got the RTX 5060 Ti to run on Gen 4 and Gen 3 PCIe, the processor is still the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D—the fastest CPU for gaming as of this writing, and so any performance deltas you see on your system with Gen 4 or Gen 3 platform could be a result of having a processor slower than the 9800X3D.