This is just one of the three new GPUs that NVIDIA is launching today, the RTX
5060Ti 16 gig. Where are the rest of
them? Well, that's a good question, isn't it? And when we reached out to
NVIDIA's board partners to find the answer, the responses we got back ranged
from complete radio silence
to what? So, I'm supposed to review
these cards with no 5060 to test and no
5060 Ti 8 gig to test and somehow draw a
conclusion. This is it. This is the point where the game has gotten so
stupid that I'm just not willing to play it anymore. Our job is to give you guys
an accurate, nonrushed review of these
things. But if NVIDIA can't do their part and actually launch the cards when
they say they're launching them, my job is impossible. Not to mention that with
the current state of things, anything that we say about the value of these
supposedly budgetoriented cards would be
meaningless anyway because MSRP needs
about a dozen asterisks beside the S these days. Now, to be clear, I'm not
blaming Team Green for the state of the global trade situation, but what they do
deserve a good old-fashioned tongue lashing for is how they've managed the
50 series launch. They oversold the performance, shipped
uncharacteristically buggy software, not to mention hardware. They cherrypicked
demos that gloss over some very legitimate downsides to what are in some
cases legitimately cool features. And then they spread the whole thing out
over months in an attempt to dominate the news cycle for far longer than this
wet fart of a launch deserves. And for
what? NVIDIA, your shareholders don't even care about this worthless gaming
segment rounding error anymore. And that's actually the first thing that I
want to talk about because it feels like with all the intimate dinners with
presidents and crocodile leather jackets, NVIDIA seems to have become
grossly out of touch with the gamers that this again budget card is supposed
to delight. Huh? The guy in the leather jacket. You
don't need to buy expensive GPUs from him. Huh? I said that our sponsor Jawua
is a legit marketplace to buy and sell used GPUs. What? Jesus. He said, "If you
want a good deal on GPUs, just go to
java.gg. NVIDIA told us that their RTX 5060 series GPUs, which we will be
covering with unboxings and some light benchmarking over on ShortCircuit, are
laser focused on users of both older 60class GPUs and game consoles. And if
you look at the Steam hardware survey, this approach actually makes sense, at
least on the surface. I mean, almost 25%
of users are running some form of 60class GPU, many of which are locked
out of fancy new features like DLSS frame generation and even DLSS AI
resolution upscaling for that matter. And we actually planned to explore this
upgrade path angle as part of our review. But here's the critical piece
that NVIDIA seems to be missing. If I bought a base tier GTX 1060, I'm the
kind of person who probably spends, you know, about 200 bucks on a GPU. Less if
I can snag a deal. What I'm probably not is the kind of person who spends 300 or
realistically 380 or $430 if I want an appropriate amount of
VRAM for modern gaming. And NVIDIA's argument only gets dumber if we compare
to console gaming. I mean, to be clear, I fully acknowledge the benefits of PC
gaming. Steam summer sales, free online multiplayer and voice chat, a smorggas
board of games and peripherals spanning decades. But for NVIDIA to roll in one
week after Nintendo's disastrous reveal that the price of the Switch 2 was $450
and go, "Okay, but hear me out. Instead
of a whole ass console, you could have just the GPU and dinner for two at
McDonald's. It's almost comical.
Speaking of things comical,
what? Me? Nice. Real nice, Lionus. But
what's not nice is the way NVIDIA has treated basically everyone like crap on
this launch. We've talked before at length about how NVIDIA's board partners
don't have cards. Their retail partners don't have products to sell. And their
customers can't even afford their products. But they took a massive dump
on us, too. When we tried to coordinate dates for our reviews, they told us,
"And I kid you not, just make your content whenever the card
arrives." What? We all know how
important it is to have a review ready the moment a new product launches. And
if there's no set date, it means that whoever charts out some benchmarks first
ends up with the best performing video. This incentivizes loweffort, lowquality
reviews, which is harmful to gamers. And
it also incentivizes crunch culture.
Gross. We're going to touch on that a little bit later in this video because
it was a major factor for us when we decided to sit this one out on LT and
upload this video instead of a video dedicated to the performance and
features of the RTX 5060 family. which is a shame because some of NVIDIA's new
AI features legitimately are kind of cool. NVIDIA has data that proves what I
know from speaking to people anecdotally, and that is that most
gamers don't really care about pixel perfect image quality, and they will
turn on features like AI upscaling and multi-frame gen, which generates three
fake frames for every real frame rendered, and enjoy them. and the 5060
series gives gamers access to these features at a lower price point than
before. We were legitimately excited to see how they might perform. The problem
is that while NVIDIA makes our jobs more
difficult doing those investigations, they're also ramping up their bombastic
marketing claims, saying things like 50 times the performance for millions of
gamers. I mean, yeah, sure, if you cherrypick the games that support these
magical more FPS settings, and if you compare to a 9-year-old card that
doesn't support these features, I guess you can say that. But I guess you can
also see why NVIDIA, after they say stuff like that, doesn't want too many
actual reviews of these cards. Did you know in other news that my 2021 Civic
Sport is actually faster than Lionus' old 2003 Civic? Just uh don't drag race
them against each other. Okay. See, NVIDIA, sounds pretty stupid when you
say it out loud, right? To be clear, I'm not hating on your AI and performance
boosting features. DLSS, multiframe gen, and in the future, Reflex 2 all seem
like excellent tools to have in my gaming toolkit. And it's also clear that
all of this stuff is here to stay given that both Intel and AMD have gotten on
board. I just don't like that you're marketing them in a way that completely
ignores their downsides, like reduced image quality, sluggish input latency,
and whatever Reflex 2's downsides will turn out to be. You're just focusing on
padding your numbers. Something that's been a bit of a pattern this year. Yeah,
let's talk about that. It seems like for NVIDIA, MSRP is a complete lie at this
point. Manufactured suggested retail pricing, more like marketing strategy to
ripoff people got them because they are
never accurate compared to real world prices. It makes it almost impossible
for reviewers to properly assess the value of these things. I'm going to
pretend here and say that every card is MSRP and delivers exactly one frame per
dollar. That would be the ideal scenario for anyone trying to assess how much
damage they want to do to their wallet. Now, let's say each card stays at the
same frame rate, but has an extra 50 bucks on it because it's not available
at MSRP. This can dramatically change
the value proposition of a budget card while barely impacting a high-end one.
Maybe even turning our conclusion from a recommend to a don't buy. And being left
in the dark on these cards is particularly worrisome since with
everything going on with global trade right now, we might be lucky if it's
only $50 over MSRP. Oh, sorry. I was just gearing up
cuz I know this next point is going to make some people mad. Unless you've been
living under a rock, I'm sure that you've heard about the will they won't
they tariff dance that our red, white, blue, green, and orange neighbors have
been doing for the last little while. We made a whole video on this a few months
ago explaining that tariffs are a consumer tax and that they will impact
pricing. But what we didn't talk about as much, even though it could be just as
impactful, is the way that the constant
back and forth of not knowing which tariffs are real and which ones aren't,
is going to impact businesses, small, medium, and large. This kind of
uncertainty affects everything from production forecasting to logistics
planning, neither of which can just pivot on a dime. So again, I'm not
blaming NVIDIA specifically if their supply is kind of messed up or if they
have to increase pricing due to tariffs. I mean, heck, we might run into the same
thing on LT Store, which totally blows.
I'm just saying that as a customer, it is something that you need to be ready
for with this launch. The Shiptorm sale
event is live now on ltstore.com. You'll get free shipping on
any order over $150 worldwide. So, it's a great time to
pick up a commuter backpack or a scribe driver, a screwdriver, or anything else
you've had your eye on. And we're featuring our lowest price ever on our
magnetic cable management essentials bundle. Go check it out at the link down
below. Woo! NVIDIA has done at least one
thing right with the 5060 family. Across the board, it's either on par or cheaper
than last generation, which is welcome considering that wafer costs are rumored
to have been climbing at an astonishing rate due to TSMC's near monopoly on
cuttingedge microprocessor fabrication. That means that assuming that these
prices are real, even if these cards performed identically to last gen in
native rendering, which they pretty much might, you're at least getting a
slightly better performance per dollar. But of course, I don't know any of that
for sure because to add to this icing on this so-called launch cake, NVIDIA
didn't give us the review guide or drivers until last Thursday. That is
just three and a half business days to study the documentation, test, retest,
message NVIDIA in case there are any issues, write the script, edit the script, shoot, edit, review, make fixes,
review again, confirm that lab's information is accurate, and then post
to YouTube. And okay, sure, I could have
just asked people nicely or more likely bribed them to give up their weekend in
order to meet the embargo for this one card. And I have no doubt that our world
class team could have done it. But real talk here for what? So you guys could be
mad in the comments about how it feels to wait 2 years for a 5% performance
improvement Sunday that has some fake frame sauce drizzled over top and then
they want me to do it again. And again at some random future juncture when the
other two cards arrive. No man, NVIDIA,
you're acting like that chick that used to be hot and she thinks she's still hot
and she thinks I'm going to likeing drop everything when she comes calling like
that. But I'm married with three kids now and not only do I love my wife, but
if we're being honest, you peaked in high school anyway. I'm not playing your
games anymore.
And honestly, that's a hard thing for me to say. I want to have positive things
to say. I like technology. I want to be
an enthusiastic voice that's finding the bright points in an increasingly
stagnant PC gaming industry. And I'm committed to
continuing to work with everyone, including NVIDIA, who we have some
really cool projects coming up with that we wouldn't have been able to do without
their sponsorship, including some sick giveaways. Like, I still love the
products. I still use them at home. It's just hard to be excited about them right
now. And it's especially hard to let you
guys down. I'm sorry that we didn't have a full review of all of these cards
today. We wanted to and we're going to do our best within regular office hours
to get some numbers into our ShortCircuit unboxing and we will get some
more detailed numbers posted on the LT Labs website. I just felt like this was
the more important message today. Do you know what else is important? The segue
to our sponsor, Rocket Money. Don't you love it when you open up your banking
app and there are a bunch of surprise charges to your card? Well, with Rocket
Money, you can identify recurring charges and even get those subscriptions
canled for you, all with just a couple of taps in their app. I mean, you're
probably pretty busy, right? Ain't nobody got time to be on a 30inut call
with customer service just to be met with, "But are you interested in our
premium package? Are you sure you want to unsubscribe?" Rocket Money doesn't
just help remove unwanted subscriptions either. They can even take those
services that you actually do want and need and negotiate a better deal for
you. Just upload a picture of your bill and with a few taps, their team will
start the process of calling your provider for you to try to get you the
best deal they can. And to set your wallet up for the future, you can use
their budgeting feature to help analyze your spending habits and notify you if
you're exceeding your limits. So start saving more and spending less. Join over
5 million RocketMoney users by heading over to
rocketmoney.com/LTT to get started for free or unlock even more features with
their premium plans. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not go check out our
video about the 5090? That is a review
that I'm super proud of and took a ton of work to get done.
Even if it's a card that like no one can afford.