Graphics cards are a funny old business. The biggest fanfare is always reserved for the most powerful and impressive cards, a glorious fusion of the latest technology that, at its best, serves up face-melting performance and visuals. But it also comes with a price to match; your retinas will be delightfully seared, but so too will your bank account. Met with less fanfare are what I’d call the “real” cards – the hardware that is actually more likely to be used by normal people – by those who aren’t sicko enough to drop two grand on a graphics card.
Which all makes sense, of course. It’s exciting to watch YouTube videos of someone whipping a Ferrari or Porsche around the track, but the vast majority of people aren’t buying those cars. They’re getting something more sensible instead. In this analogy, now stretched to breaking point, the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is something more attainable and reliable. It’s a Toyota, or some sort of hot hatch from Volkswagen. You get the idea.
The RTX 5060 Ti comes in two forms, with the difference being memory. Let’s get one thing out of the way right up top: you shouldn’t even think about the lesser of the two, the 8GB model. I haven’t tested it, but broader media consensus makes clear that model is something of a dud. As is often the case, the lower-memory variant seems to primarily exist to make the advertising RRP lower – but in real terms, you should always spend the extra $50 or £50 to get the better one.
Putting the 8GB model aside, then, we’re left with the 16GB variant. This one I have tested. It clocks in at $429/£399, which puts it a clean $120 behind the next model up, the 5070. This price point – sub $500 – is utterly key for being a card that exists for the mainstream.
Pricing will vary a little up and down the range as Nvidia isn’t doing a founders edition version of this card, which more firmly ‘anchors’ the price across the range. I tested the Palit Infinity branded version – it’s a solid card, with a good, quiet cooling solution, and a reasonable dual-slot design. It’s generally available for around RRP – though at the time of printing, most stores have an uplift of around £30 on the price of this specific card, presumably due to supply shortages.
Anyway. I expect you already know just from reading the price point precisely how you feel about it. The question is: can this card perform? Let’s get into that, with VG247’s patented series of expedited tests.
Jumping straight in with Cyberpunk 2077, a favorite, we can see that at 1440p the game comfortably manages an average frame rate in excess of 30fps with the real-time ray tracing cranked up to the ‘Psycho’ setting – and without any upscaling assistance.
As I said in my coverage of the much more expensive 5080, the smarter play with the 50 series is to compare it not to the previous generation (the 40 series), but to two generations back – the 30 series. If you already have a 40 series GPU, what are you even doing here? There’s loads of life left in the GPU you have. If you have a 30 series, however, you can see more of a reasonable uplift in performance that might be worth opening your wallet.
Back to Cyberpunk, then. On the 3060 Ti, the headline was that you could finally play ray traced Cyberpunk natively at 1080p at a reasonable frame rate in the high 30s or low 40s. Go to 1440p, however, and you’d get a suboptimal, sub-30fps experience. So in this battle, two generations buys you a performance bump that lets you stretch to 1440p. In an apples-to-apples comparison, at 1440p Cyberpunk performance jumps by over 35% going from the 3060 Ti to the 5060 Ti. At 1080p it’s a similar story, differing by only a few percentage points.
Hopping to a game without all the ray-traced lighting stuff placing a dumbbell-heavy weight on the scales, you can see a similar level of improvement in raw rasterization – that is to say, pumping out pretty graphics for your eyeballs. Forza Horizon 5 is perfect for this sort of test. With maxed-out settings and at 1440p, the 3060 Ti could deliver well in excess of 60fps – around the 80fps mark, in fact. The 4060 Ti 16 gb, one generation back, gets another ten or so on that. The 5060 Ti sadly doesn’t hit that magical 120fps point – but it gets close, making an average just shy of 110fps.
Would you care to guess how much that increase is, in raw terms? Oh, it’s about 35% again. Consistency! These results are broadly repeated across most of the games I tested. There’s always outliers, but a rule of a little over a third better than two generations ago and around 20% up on the equivalent card last generation holds true.
All of this also gets augmented by the underlying tech which remains Nvidia’s secret weapon. It’s true that AMD has FSR, but DLSS in particular remains best-in-class for frame-boosting upscaling technology. If we return to those Cyberpunk examples, you can enjoy frame rates well in excess of 100fps at 1440p if you flick DLSS frame generation on. In fact, 120fps feels within reach. With DLSS, there’s even upside here for the 5060 Ti as a card for ‘native’ 4K (if you are happy to call a DLSS upscale native-ish), at least for compatible games.
Add to that the fact that this is a 50 series card and it all adds up: 50 series GPUs get access to all the latest features – so multi frame gen, the latest variant of DLSS, and so on. This is a cheaper card, yes, but in this it remains as cutting edge as the $2000 5090. That has been Nvidia’s potent pitch for the last couple of generations, and it remains a powerful proposition here.
That technology will likely be the difference when someone is deciding on if they want this card or AMD’s similarly-priced, similarly-performing RX 7800 XT. It also becomes a deciding factor against other Nvidia cards. If you are on a 20 or 30 series RTX GPU, access to DLSS4, MFG, and other newer RTX card features as outlined in our review of the flagship 5090 are likely as much a factor as the raw power increase. The 5060 Ti has all that.
The final factor is the price, of course, $429 can be difficult to swallow, and I appreciate that. In ‘raw’ bang for buck terms, the 5070 and the 5080 both offer more ‘frames per dollar’ if you really want to get into the weeds on that. But they’re also hundreds of dollars more – and the 5060 Ti 16GB feels to fit into a reasonable and more broadly attainable price bracket.
Do I still think it’s a little much? Well, yes. But that’s a broader GPU market problem as we face what feels like a proper death of truly affordable mid to high-end computing. Within the context of the current market, the pricing of the 5060 Ti feels fine for the performance you’re getting.
In short, this definitely feels like the 50 series’ coming out into the mainstream – which is a good thing to see. Sometimes that doesn’t happen until the inevitable mid-generation refresh. If you have a 20 or 30 series, are getting that upgrade itch, and plan to play at 1440p or below – this is probably the card for you. Otherwise, you might want to wait a few more years – or get to saving.
Nvidia provided a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB sample to facilitate this coverage.
