I often think of graphics cards as being a little bit like cars. They’re performance focused, but aesthetics and efficiency also hugely matter. They also run the budgeting gamut. If you want to run everything with all the bells and whistles, then your Porsche or Ferrari equivalent is there for you, should you be willing to part with a huge chunk of change. Equally, most people don’t need nor can afford such extravagance. Sometimes you just need something decent that is going to get you where you need to go.
For most gamers, where they need to go is running the newest games at stable frame rates and having them look good. In many cases this is the realm of the console – but increasingly more players are jumping onto the PC bandwagon at an entry level – which is where graphics cards like the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 come in.
Now, disclosure time – this is not a review of the 5060. Consider it a first look, so to speak, since the truly finalized drivers for this particular GPU weren’t available at the time of testing and Nvidia gave us an early glimpse at the card in more limited circumstances. As such, I’m not presenting in-depth benchmarks and the like today. I’ll check in with a final verdict along those lines a little later on – but for now, I wanted to take a brief early look (a preview, I suppose) at what this new $300 card is capable of.
That price point is crucial. $300 is in the sort of realm where it’s a viable upgrade to toss in to an older PC, but for that money you’re also getting a card that is nevertheless a member of Nvidia’s ‘50 series’ family. That means access to all of the latest bits of snazzy RTX technology – including the new ‘multi frame generation’ (MFG) option that in supported games will let you boost frame rates massively with AI-augmented fakery that is surprisingly well-executed.
It’s also a relatively familiar price. If you look at the class of card this belongs to from Nvidia, the price has been relatively stable for a while. 2019’s RTX 2060 ran $350 at launch, while the 4060 launched at $300. If you go back to 2016, before the advent of the ‘RTX’ era, you can find cheaper – but that was a long time ago in human terms, leave alone in the context of the evolution of PC graphics. In line with that evolution the expectations of such a card have shifted, too, obviously – which is where we come to a preview of this card, tested strictly on the terms Nvidia is most keen to highlight – which is obviously going to be favorable. Within these parameters, it’s a powerful proposition on paper.
These parameters saw us offered a selection of games that Nvidia suggested as ideal for road testing the 5060. Among these was Cyberpunk, an old favorite tester of mine, and Doom The Dark Ages, the newly-released shooter that requires ray-tracing and benefits greatly from high frame rates and responsiveness. I zeroed in on those.
With only 8GB of VRAM, the 5060 obviously has a bottleneck that sets it apart from the higher-end cards. But we also have to be realistic: this is a card primarily designed for 1080p or 1440p gaming, and as an RTX card you also have to assume that in many modern games DLSS is going to be something you want to switch on. Which is handy, as Nvidia’s guidelines for an early look at the card indeed wanted DLSS and Multi-Frame Generation switched on.
As far as these features go, each individual has to decide if they’re content to make peace with the concept of upscaling, or indeed in ‘fake frames’ if you turn on frame generation. I personally think it’s fine – great, even – so long as the end result is a high-quality image. Others want raw rendering, of course – but if you’re in that camp you probably need to save more cash for a higher-end card. If you are simply focused on how the games look and feel on your eyeballs and in your hands, however, this is definitely a reasonable option.
Looking at Doom, it all becomes clear that 8GB of VRAM be damned, DLSS4 does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Let’s be blunt: you can whack the latest Doom release onto the ‘Ultra Nightmare’ preset – and then toggle on DLSS4’s balanced preset and 3x MFG, Nvidia’s two big frame-boosting offerings. With that setup, you can enjoy this brand-new shooter at 1080p with a frame rate in excess of 200fps. Tasty.
Hop on over to Cyberpunk, which is broadly a more taxing game, and in RT Overdrive settings you’re once again reliant on those extra features of the 50 series hardware to get it to where you want it. Here the headline is an average FPS of around 120 – a magic number for high-end displays – but this came with heavier dips and stuttering when things got really heated than in Doom. This is something that could get mopped up with drivers, but my read is that this is probably the likely final performance – heavy highs but with some caveats – which is sort of to be expected on an entry-level card.
Like I say, a lot of it comes down to your acceptance of the parameters of this card – and this preview. Is 1080p acceptable to you in 2025? And are you willing to accept turning on features that mean that all the frames you’re seeing aren’t technically ‘real’? That might also bring with it the odd blurry frame or diffuse detail, too. But that’s the trade off. The answer to how acceptable all that is will vary depending on the individual player – but many will doubtless take that deal for a shot at a game like DOOM at 200fps for $300.
This is obviously a new generation card in terms of raw rendering too – but the focus of previews tips Nvidia’s hand, in a sense: this is a card led by its additional performance-enhancing features. Nvidia’s frame generation and upscaling technology is best-in-class – and this is now the cheapest way to get the newest generation of it. Testing in the coming weeks will reveal how well the 5060 stacks up against the 4060 and older in raw rendering, and it’s here that the rubber may meet the road in terms of the question of if this is truly a full-on upgrade or not. But with the bells and whistles turned on, it looks to be a good quarter-step better than its predecessor while remaining at the same price.
The concept is ‘Champagne Taste on a Beer Budget’, as the saying goes. But you’re not going to get actual Bollinger for the price of a four pack of Stella. There will always be compromises. But whereas before budget card marketing would promise you a stable 30fps, we’ve now got it talking about 120, albeit with frame generation. Or to continue my clunky analogy, previously at the entry level you were, indeed, just buying beer. This is masquerading as something else – and in many cases, the generated frames do the job impeccably. The question now is how this card performs more broadly, outside of narrow tests on just a handful of games. Stay tuned for that.
