As much as it pains me to say it, this review of NVIDIA's RTX 5050 is probably
the most important GPU review I will do
this year. Because the bottom line is that for so many of you out there,
whether you're building your own PC or getting it in the pre-built your
grandmother got you for your birthday, this is the GPU you're going to use.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Everybody has their own budget.
It's just that when a better graphics card could be had for the same price or
if there's a significant upgrade for a much less significant extra cost, it
hurts me to see these boxes flying off
the shelves instead despite my years of
tactipping to the contrary. Which is why this time I am entrusting everyone else
to persuade you. Maybe when you hear it from the people who actually have time
to play video games after work, you'll believe us when we say stay away from
this launch. Maybe they can also help me warn you about our sponsor sponsors.
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Dbrand. I guess >> let me start by pointing out that we're using a high-end test bench to evaluate
what will likely be the most entry-level offering from NVIDIA this generation.
This is done to alleviate any potential bottlenecks that may distort our
results, but it's not exactly a realistic configuration. I mean, nobody
is going to pair a $250 RTX5050 with a
$450 Ryzen 7800 X3D or with fast,
high-capacity DDR5 memory, or at least
they shouldn't. Realistically, if you buy this card, your performance will be
at least a little bit worse than what we're going to show you today. So, with
that in mind, let's kick things off with gaming. This thing blows. And by that, I
mean it trades blows with our RTX 4060 at 1080p. In Counterstrike 2, the RTX
5050 is in the bottom four, beating out the two generation old 3060, but losing
to last gen 4060. And we see that same behavior in Red Dead Redemption 2. On
the other hand, The Last of Us Part One at 1080p is just kind of sad. The 12 gig
RTX 3060 pushes the 5050 from the
bottom. Probably because the 5050 only has 8 gigs of VRAM, whereas this game
utilized over 9 gigs on cards that had the capacity. Sure, we're crushing the
RTX 3050. There's no 4050. So, that's the most recent 50 class card. That's
like congratulating yourself for beating your 8-year-old baby brother in a boxing
match. Sorry, little buddy. No mercy.
The 50/50 sometimes beats the 4060, but
usually not by a lot. F124 is an extra
frame the 1% lows and 10 more in the averages. And we see a similar uplift in
Cyberpunk 2077. But what's this? The
4060 wins once you enable ray tracing in both these games. Yep. The 5050 may have
24th gen RT cores, but the whole package
isn't enough to keep up with the 24 third gen RT cores in the 4060.
Pathetic. If you thought 1080p was bad, well, check out 1440p. The 50/50 goes
from trading blows to just blowing it against the 4060. It only wins in a
single game, and that's Cyberpunk. Adding insult to injury, check out how
good the 3060 12 gig looks by comparison across every single game we've tested.
Our poor RTX 5050 is barely beating out a 60class card from two generations ago.
And in VRAMm hungry games like The Last of Us Part One, the 5050 loses again.
We'll talk more about pure value later, but even the 9060 XT and RTX 5060,
despite only having 8 gigs of VRAM, destroy the 50/50 in our gaming tests,
which is pretty bad, especially when you consider that a more futurep proof card
like the Intel Arc B580 can now be found easily for around $260.
And that comes with 12 gigs of VRAM. That will make it a safer bet as AAA
game requirements creep up over the next few years, assuming Intel's GPU division
still exists over the next few years. But hey, NVIDIA's frame gen can make up
for the 5050's poor performance, right? Oh, hey, didn't see you there. You know,
this isn't the most scientifically accurate test we've ever done, but here's some slow motion footage of
Cyberpunk running on the RTX 5050 at 1080p. The mouse moves, then the game
moves 27 frames of footage later, which indicates overall system latency of 27
millisecond. Now, let's enable frame generation and crank it up to 4x
alongside DAA.
Our game is now running at around 200 FPS. Great, but notice the increased
latency. It's pretty minor, and even in twitchy firstperson shooters, it could
be imperceptible to many. Sounds like a decent trade-off, right? But our base
frame rate was already a solid 98 frames per second. Frame generation is what we
in the MTG community call a win more card. It only really works well if
you're already in a good situation. Here, watch what happens if we have a
low starting frame rate. At 1440p, our base frame rate averages around 63 FPS.
Good, but nowhere near the almost 100 we just came from. Rendering natively,
we're starting with the same 36 frames of latency that we saw at 1080p with
frame gen set to four in the previous clip. So then what happens when we add
frame gen at 1440p? You're looking at MFG3X where we're getting an additional
12 frames of latency even though our total frames per second or higher. Can
an average person feel it? Not necessarily. But some of you out there
are going to be sensitive to it. Let's be clear, we don't hate frame
generation. And to NVIDIA's credit, they continue to improve the tech with every
single generation just like they did with DLSS. What we do hate is how NVIDIA
uses these features to mislead consumers by posting unfair representations of
video card performance, which is especially bad because not every game
supports those features.
Sure, you could use an inexpensive thirdparty tool like Lothless Scaling,
but even with the bells and whistles, if you buy this card, you're getting
fleeced. Unlike if you buy the new transparent screwdriver from
ltstore.com, it's a clear winner when it comes to nifty tools. Let's talk price
and value. Starting with some of our competitors, AMD's 9060 XT8 GB, which is
at the top of our 1080p Geomine results, costs us $2.32 per frame. The B580, $242
is very nice. Then we get to the 5050 at $265.
But it gets worse. The RTX5060,
which costs around $299, just 50 bucks more than the 50/50, beats the 50/50 in
value at $2.52. These aren't massive swings in value
when you're looking at averages, but it still shows what a terrible deal the
50/50 is. A huge part of why you get such better value with the more
expensive card is that for $50 more, you're getting literally 50% more
hardware. The 5060 has 50% more CUDA cores, 50% more texture processing
clusters, 50% more streaming multipprocessors, 50% more tensor cores,
50% more RT cores, 50% more texture units, and 50% more ROP units than the
5050. And while this card is on the same
128 bit bus, it's using GDDR6 instead of
seven. Why? Because NVIDIA says G6 is
best for desktops and the more power efficient G7. Well, that's that's best
for laptops. Cool. So, then why not put the superefficient stuff in the one card
in the desktop lineup that might actually want an extra low TDP? I just I
don't get it. I quit. I can't I just can't do it anymore. >> Productivity. If there's anything
positive to say about the 50/50, it's that it blends pretty okay. Sure, it
renders our scene slower than the 4060 and hardly faster than a 3060, but sub 2
minutes ain't half bad. We see similar results in Puget Bench's Premiere Pro
benchmark, where our 50/50 is clearly pulling ahead and only overshadowed by
the 5060. The Arc B580 puts up a good
fight both here and in Puget Bench's Photoshop benchmarks. But then that card
gets a big fat DNF with Puget's Da Vinci Resolve test, allowing NVIDIA to get a
couple of blurry W's. Despite NVIDIA's obsession with AI, they failed to make
the 5050s AI performance anything but underwhelming. In Proon AI image
generation, the 50/50 is barely beating the 3060 again. And in text generation,
the 50/50 is nothing to write home about. See what we did there? My biggest
takeaway here is how great the ARC B580 is. Look at how much it crushes even our
5060. Just look at what extra VRAMm
NVIDIA improper support AMD can do. If
Intel can figure it out as the new kid showing up with open vinyl, nobody has a
good excuse. In summary, the RTX 5050 only makes sense as a product designed
to make the RTX 5060 look good. And if you saw that review, you know that it
does not look good. We can't in good conscience recommend the 50/50. It flat
out sucks. And there are so many options that we've mentioned in this video that
exist and we'll have all of those linked in the video description for you to
check out. There's a saying that there are no bad products, just bad prices.
And in RTX50 series fashion, the price is bad. But, you know, if nobody buys it
and it gets discounted to maybe like $200,
maybe then I could finally segue to our sponsor,
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description. Oh, I get it. To learn more today, thanks for watching. If you like
this video, go check out our 960 XT review. The 16 GB model is really the
way to go, but if it's too far out of your price range, then a B580 or even an
8 gig 960 XT would be better than garbage. Just dog.