Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 review: a necessary update, not an exciting one

We do our best to deliver clean, reliable benchmark numbers. Each of our tests encompasses 60 seconds or more of real-world gameplay, carefully chosen to represent what we expect will be typical gameplay experiences. We sanity-check every result and retest whenever necessary to ensure that outliers don’t muck up our final standings.

For now, we're sticking with native resolution testing at a mix of high and ultra settings at 1080p, as well as ultra settings at 1440p and 4K.

We're weighing whether pure native-res testing will remain the way to go going forward, as pretty much every vendor-independent TAA or upscaler implementation (like Epic's TSR) looks worse than DLSS 4, FSR 4, or XeSS running at the Balanced or Quality preset.

We think that more and more gamers are taking advantage of the performance and image quality benefits of these upscalers without a second thought, and we're weighing whether to enable them by default so our tests are more representative of the real-world performance figures gamers can expect when buying into and using a vendor's entire hardware-software stack.

This is a tough decision, and not one we're making lightly. Any final verdict on the way forward likely won't occur before 2026. For now, we're leaving upscaling and framegen off and sticking with native-res testing exclusively.

Our first draft of a new test suite covers 12 raster-only titles. Five of those include additional RT options that we employ in our tests, while two more require a graphics card with RT support to run at all. Finally, we tested GTA V Enhanced exclusively with RT enabled, as that extra eye candy is the entire reason to run it over GTA V Legacy, in our opinion.

Here's our complete list of tested titles:

• Black Myth: Wukong (+RT)
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (+RT)
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (+RT)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (+RT)
• Alan Wake II (+RT)
• Fortnite
• Marvel Rivals
• Apex Legends
• Counter-Strike 2
• Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
• Stalker 2
• Doom: The Dark Ages (RT required)
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (RT required)
• Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced (RT)
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

We've tried to cover a broad mix of game engines, graphics APIs, and game types in this lineup, from popular esports experiences to crushing AAA visual feasts developed both natively for PC and ports from consoles. Our selected games stress every part of a modern graphics card, from pure compute horsepower to VRAM management to RT to driver overhead at high frame rates. If a card rises to the top of our charts after weathering all of these tests, you can be sure that it's a standout product.

When picking titles to test, we considered games' time in market, active player counts, review scores (to see whether a title is likely to become an enduring part of PC gaming), and the ease of conducting a repeatable benchmark, among other factors.

Wherever possible, we use real, live, eyes-on-screen, hands-on-mouse-and-keyboard benchmark runs. We don't think automated, on-rails, hands-off canned benchmarks fully capture the gameplay experience on a given graphics card.

Only by actually playing a game can we account for factors like how input lag affects the experience, and making sure that a title has acceptable input lag is becoming a key consideration when latency-sensitive framegen techniques are becoming more and more common as performance-boosting tools.

Our current test system comprises the following components:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• Motherboard: ASUS TUF Gaming X670E-Plus Wifi
• Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 32GB DDR5-6000
• Storage: Inland Gaming Performance Plus 4TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
• Power supply: Corsair RM1000x

With all that out of the way, let's dive into our results.

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