Summary
The huge, high-end graphics cards that cost over a thousand bucks are always cool to look at and play with, but the truth is that most gamers won’t spend nearly this much for one. For everyone else, though, NVIDIA has just launched the RTX 5050 graphics card, with a reduced price tag.
NVIDIA has officially unveiled its new GeForce RTX 5050 series of graphics cards. This GPU is available in both a desktop and a laptop flavor, and both look really nice. The desktop version notably requires a single 8-pin PCIe power connector and has a maximum power draw of 130W at stock speeds, making it suitable for systems with power supplies as low as 550W—this will, of course, depend on other components in your PC, such as the CPU.
The card, in its desktop version, has 2,560 NVIDIA Blackwell CUDA cores, 5th-gen AI Tensor cores for DLSS, and 4th-gen ray tracing cores. The card is equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 video memory on a 128-bit bus and has a base clock speed of 2.31GHz. It also includes the latest 9th Generation NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC) and 6th Generation NVIDIA Decoder (NVDEC) for improved media performance.
In traditional rasterization, the new card is stated to be 60% faster on average than the RTX 3050—as a reminder, the RTX 4050 was only launched in a laptop flavor. The performance gap widens dramatically in games that support the full suite of DLSS 4 technologies, including Multi Frame Generation, where the RTX 5050 is reportedly 4 times faster. The company highlights that the upgrade will be even more impactful for users of older cards like the GTX 1650, which lacks dedicated hardware for ray tracing and DLSS.
I’ve always argued that it’s kind of cheating to mention DLSS performance here, since it’s ultimately just rendering the game at a lower resolution and scaling it up from there. It was actually weird for NVIDIA toshowcase the fake framesas part of its performance gains back when the RTX 5090 was announced. However, in a card like this, I would actually argue that DLSS istheselling point to get one. It’s a cheap card that has access to DLSS 4 and all of NVIDIA’s latest mumbo jumbo, so you’re able to squeeze a lot of juice out of those $250. Because, yes, it’s only $249.99. That makes it about as cheap as other competitor cards, and you might be able to get better performance out of this one thanks to DLSS.
This card will go on sale next month, so keep an eye out at your retailer of choice if you want to snag one for your next budget build.
