Nvidia’s upcoming GeForce RTX 5060, scheduled for release on May 19 with a starting price of 9, promises an enticing experience for gamers, particularly in 1080p gaming with remarkably high frame rates. However, a significant concern looms over its 8GB of video memory, which may not suffice for demanding titles like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which requires a baseline of 12GB of VRAM. This has left many gamers apprehensive about the card’s ability to deliver the expected performance.
Buttery smooth (provided you stay in Nvidia’s playground)
In our preliminary testing of five titles at 1080p, including Avowed, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom: The Dark Ages, Hogwarts Legacy, and Marvel Rivals, the RTX 5060 Ti performed admirably, often meeting or slightly exceeding Nvidia’s performance claims. It’s important to note that these results were achieved under conditions optimized for Nvidia GPUs, suggesting that while the card excels within this ecosystem, performance may vary with less optimized titles.
For those who remain within Nvidia’s well-trodden paths, the experience at 1080p is indeed enjoyable, bolstered by the capabilities of DLSS 4, which serves as the backbone of this performance.
AI is the secret weapon
The integration of DLSS 4 has unlocked impressive frame rates for the RTX 5060 Ti, even at 1440p. While traditional rendering methods may not be the sole approach, the new transformer model for frame generation has proven effective, allowing for smooth gameplay in demanding scenarios such as Doom at Ultra Nightmare settings. Frame rates maintained over 200 FPS with multi-frame generation 4x enabled, showcasing the potential of AI in gaming performance.
Interestingly, the texture pool size during these tests hovered just above 1.5GB, indicating that the neural rendering techniques are effectively alleviating some of the VRAM demands. Notably, we did not encounter any clipping or stuttering during gameplay, further highlighting the card’s capabilities.
However, it’s worth mentioning that Cyberpunk 2077’s benchmarking tool did not accurately reflect the frame rates, likely due to the pre-release driver used for the RTX 5060. While the game reported an average of 34.97 FPS, our observations during gameplay suggested a much higher performance, indicating that the potential of the card may not be fully captured by existing benchmarks.
Hitting the overrides
One challenge encountered with the RTX 50-series cards is navigating the DLSS override settings within the Nvidia app. Gamers may find themselves perplexed when a game claims to support all DLSS 4 options, yet those options do not appear in the game settings. The solution involves manually overriding these settings through the Nvidia app, a process that can be cumbersome and may deter less experienced users.
Despite these hurdles, the results can be striking. For instance, when we applied the appropriate overrides for Avowed, setting it to Epic preset with DLSS on quality and multi-frame generation 4x, the game delivered a crisp experience at 190 FPS. Similarly, Hogwarts Legacy exceeded Nvidia’s claim of 156 FPS at 1080p, though achieving these results necessitated considerable tweaking of PC settings, particularly with ray tracing options.
Outlook
While the learning curve associated with optimizing settings may pose a challenge for some, the initial impressions of the RTX 5060 are promising. The AI-driven enhancements that facilitate high frame rates are impressive, providing a smooth gaming experience with minimal ghosting and latency issues. However, the question of whether 8GB of video memory will be adequate remains unanswered, warranting further testing to fully assess the card’s capabilities.
