The first third-party review for Nvidia's new RTX 5050 graphics card has been published at Quasarzone, and throughout the extensive benchmarks, it falls behind the Intel Arc B580 by 2.5% on average, and the RTX 4060 by around seven percent. It proves notably faster than the RTX 3060, though, topping it by just over 13% across the 15-game average.
As with all of Nvidia's recent 8GB graphics card releases, no review samples were sent out for the new RTX 5050, but we had our first taste of what it could do from board partner Inno3D a few days ago. It also hasn't stopped reviewers from buying up the card themselves to see how it performs. While other reviews from native English publications will no doubt follow in the coming days, this first one gives us a clear picture of what the RTX 5050 is capable of, including impressive gains when using multi frame generation.
Testing the card against a range of its peers from current and previous generations, QuasarZone ran the card at 1080p in 15 popular games and some 3DMark synthetic benchmarks. Although there were a few points of variation from game to game, the RTX 5050 largely performed weaker than the RTX 4060 and B580, but better than the RTX 3060 and RTX 2070 Super. It also beat out the RX 7600, but only by less than a percentage point.
One area where the RTX 5050 did show a significant advantage, though, was in games that support multi frame generation. There, despite being far slower than last-generation cards at native or when just using DLSS upscaling, the RTX 5050 could leverage multi frame generation to beat not just the RTX 4060 significantly, but also the RTX 4060 Ti. Where those cards can only generate a single AI frame in between the native ones, the RTX 5050 can use multi frame gen at up to 4x mode to generate an additional three AI frames.
Although not everyone is a fan of the input lag increase and visual artifacts that can be present when using multi frame generation, it is a unique advantage of the RTX 50-series and gives the RTX 5050 a feature that its otherwise-faster counterparts can't match.
The review doesn't highlight any particular issues with the 8GB of VRAM on the card, though it was only tested at 1080p. As with other graphics cards of its generation, like the 8GB RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti, it's possible that this could be a limiting factor when raising resolution or detail levels.
The RTX 5050 does have some overclocking headroom, though. QusarZone was able to push its core clock up by an impressive 420MHz, and the memory by an additional 1,000MHz. Combined, those gave the card a near-10% increase in TimeSpy score and an extra 7% in Cyberpunk 2077 frame rates. Further overclocking was limited by the hard-locked 130W TDP.
The question now becomes whether these performance advantages, such as they are, are enough to encourage gamers to spend $250-$300. Sales of new 8GB GPUs this year are down significantly, according to recent data from German retailer Mindfactory. The lower price of this entry-level card will surely help, but there's plenty of competition at this price point. And as this review shows, a number of those cards beat or compete favorably with Nvidia's new budget card.
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