Today’s the day you’ve been waiting for…assuming that you’ve been waiting for new Nvidia graphics cards that don’t cost $500 or more. The RTX 5060 Ti is now officially launched, and Adam and Will in the PCWorld labs have their hands on both of them. Check out how they performed in the latest YouTube video.
Sadly the only review units that Nvidia sent out were variations on the 16GB version of the RTX 5060 Ti. The 8GB version should be on store shelves, at least theoretically and for a few seconds before it sells out, but it doesn’t look like many reviews are popping up on launch day. But the good news is that the 16GB version, which has an MSRP of $429 (yeah, we’ll see about that), is pretty darn good.
In the initial benchmark rundown, Adam kept the comparisons as relevant as possible: an apples-to-apples comparison with the last-gen RTX 4060 Ti, also in 16GB flavor, the step-up RTX 5070, and the Radeon 7700 XT (which is AMD’s comparable card for the Nvidia 40-series). In short, the new card is pretty darn good, even if you’re not interested in Nvidia’s heavily pushed upscaling, frame generation, or ray tracing goodies.
Restricting the testing to pure raster-based benchmarks at 1080p, the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB saw a boost from 8 percent to 32 percent over the last generation. That wasn’t always enough to beat AMD’s 7700 XT, but it was in some games like Rainbow Six Siege and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Things were similar with a little bit of ray tracing goodness added on top, with the new card edging out AMD and beating the 4060 Ti by 10-20 percent. For heavy ray tracing like Black Myth Wukong, you can see even more than that.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a great all-in-one test bench for new cards. And the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti got dramatically better results than the 4060 Ti, bumping up 32 percent on pure raster performance. It gained 14 percent on the intense path tracing and upscaling test with DLSS but no frame generation. When you flip on frame generation (wherein Nvidia can insert three card-generated frames for every one rasterized frame), it more than doubles the performance versus the 4060 Ti…which you’d expect, since that generation of card can only do x2 frame gen instead of x4. Limiting it to the same x2 bump on both cards, the 5060 Ti can get a 14 percent boost.
AI and video editing performance showed approximately the same 15-20 percent boost, and the power consumption for the new card showed that it’s running at about the same level of electricity as the 4060 Ti, and well below the AMD card tested. But the big question remaining is, how much will these cards really cost you…and how long will those prices remain stable as the US taxes and trade war with China creates extreme instability in this and other markets.
You also might want to wait for the cheaper 5060 non-Ti ($300 MSRP) and 5060 Ti 8GB ($380) for a more even comparison. While you wait, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube and check out our weekly podcast, The Full Nerd. Yesterday’s episode was all about the new Nvidia cards.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.