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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB Ray Tracing Gaming Performance
Ray tracing can be extremely demanding, and it often requires high-end hardware. Is the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB a "high-end" GPU? Not in our opinion, which means that performance at higher resolutions will quickly drop into the unplayable range. Upscaling and framegen are generally required to get a good experience from the 5060 Ti and similar GPUs with ray tracing enabled, but we'll stick with native for our baseline performance tests.
The more demanding RT games are usually better optimized for Nvidia GPUs, and often Nvidia promoted. That's no surprise as Nvidia has been pushing the tech far more than AMD or Intel. We've got four RT games for our testing — we dropped Control Ultimate due to a recent patch, and are currently retesting it. We also ditched Minecraft, for a variety of reasons.
It's also worth pointing out that both Avatar and F1 24 are relatively lightweight games as far as RT goes. The latter doesn't seem to use RT too much, unless you use the "unobtanium" settings, while F1 24 shows very little difference in visuals with RT on or off — and even at 4K it's hitting pretty reasonable framerates. Our intent is to add another DXR game or two in future reviews, preferably more demanding games.
Because ray tracing is so much more demanding, we've ordered the charts from 1080p medium through 4K ultra — with the understanding that 4K ultra at native rendering will be far too much for budget and mainstream GPUs. But the results are there if you want to look at them.
With ray tracing, the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB comes in ahead of AMD's previous generation RX 7800 XT, but it's still behind the RTX 4070. The 5070, 9070, and 4070 Super are all pretty close to tied in overall RT performance.
Gen-on-gen, the 5060 Ti 16GB outperforms the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB by 13–19 percent, with the bigger margins coming at higher resolutions and settings. The PNY card still squeaks past the Asus card, though not by a meaningful amount, and the thermals and noise levels are also something to consider. Three of the four DXR games in our suite had serious performance issues with 8GB cards (like the 4060 Ti).
You can certainly use the 5060 Ti 16GB to play ray tracing games, and even full RT is within reach if you enable upscaling and framegen/MFG. 1080p Ultra ran sufficiently fast in three of the four games, but Cyberpunk 2077 still needs a bit of help to get above 60 FPS (never mind the full RT-overdrive settings).
Combining all 18 game results into a single chart doesn't radically change the view. The RTX 5060 Ti outperforms its RTX 4060 Ti (8GB) predecessor by 15 percent at 1080p, 25% at 1440p, and 65% at 4K. 8GB definitely doesn't work well at 4K, but the 4060 Ti 16GB fares much better — the 5060 Ti is only 16–21 percent faster. That's a decent uplift, for a lower price (ostensibly), but it's also not a worthwhile upgrade. If you're running a GPU from four years back, the 5060 Ti should be a lot more compelling.
There's still a big gap between the 5060 Ti 16GB and the 5070, and an even larger gap between the 5060 Ti and the 9070. The pricing gap is equally large. The new 5060 Ti does consistently surpass AMD's RX 7700 XT, however, which isn't something the 4060 Ti could manage — not that the 7700 XT can be found at decent prices these days (in the U.S.)
In retrospect, I feel like I was perhaps too harsh about the 4060 Ti 16GB. It's still primarily a 1440p or 1080p card, and most of the biggest differences in performance between the 8GB and 16GB cards only show up at 4K. But even where performance is generally okay on the 8GB model, there are plenty of occasions where the 16GB just doesn't feel as temperamental. The big issue with the 4060 Ti was that the doubled VRAM was originally a $100 upsell. It's a far more palatable $50 difference with the 5060 Ti, which makes the 8GB card mostly superfluous.
The individual RT gaming charts follow, again with limited commentary on each.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora uses ray tracing, but it's not particularly forthcoming on when and where it's used. Reflections, in general, don't appear to use RT, which is one of the most noticeable upgrades RT can provide. Instead, it's used for shadows and possibly global illumination and some other effects. What I can say for sure is that nothing in the menus (other than "BVH Quality") directly mentions ray tracing, and the performance hit doesn't seem to be as severe as in some games. Still, since there's RT of some form, this one gets lumped into our DXR suite. Our test sequence runs around the outside of the Resistance HQ.
Possibly the most hyped-up use of RT in a game, Cyberpunk 2077 launched with more RT effects than other games of its era, and later, the 2.0 version added full path tracing and DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction. Ray reconstruction ends up looking the best but only works on Nvidia GPUs, so, as with upscaling, it can be a case of trying to compare apples and oranges.
We're using medium settings with RT lighting at medium and RT reflections enabled, and then the step up uses the RT-Ultra preset. In all cases, any form of upscaling or frame generation gets turned off. Our test sequence is a manual walk around Night City in the vicinity of Tom's Diner, during the day.
F1 24 enables several RT effects on the ultra preset but leaves them off on medium. But then 1080p medium runs at hundreds of frames per second, so we went ahead and turned all the RT effects on for our testing. We use the Great Britain track for testing.
Last on our list of RT-enabled games, Spider-Man: Miles Morales doesn't look as nice with RT turned on as the previous Spider-Man: Remastered. The reflections are less obvious, and perhaps performance is better as a result. But beyond the RT effects, maxing out the settings in Miles Morales definitely needs more than 8GB of VRAM, and even 12GB cards can struggle at times. Our test sequence has us swinging around New York, above a street that has some cars and pedestrians.
One final ray tracing benchmark we have is the 3DMark DXR Feature Test, where we report the average FPS rather than the calculated score. This is similar to full RT in a game, only done via a standalone benchmark and perhaps in a more vendor-agnostic fashion. Nvidia has also fixed a bug here that was causing Blackwell 50-series GPUs to underperform.
If this truly represents the RT hardware capabilities of the various GPUs, it looks like AMD still has plenty of catching up to do. The 5060 Ti 16GB beats the RX 9070 — not by a lot, but considering the 9070 normally takes on the 5070, it shows how good Nvidia's RT cores are. Alternatively, it shows that Nvidia has done more work to optimize drivers for 3DMark, so take these results for what they are but look to gaming RT results as a better overall indication of performance.
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