Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050

Entry-level Blackwell card brings a much-needed performance boost, but not enough to justify its price

- JEFFREY KAMPMAN

In some ways, the GeForce RTX 5050 is stuck in time. Just like the RTX 3050, it has 2,560 CUDA cores, and while the latest Blackwell architecture is much more capable and clocked higher (2,572MHz boost versus 1,780MHz), that number feels low compare to the 3,840 CUDA cores of the RTX 5060 - a card that typically costs around £50 more.

What's more, unlike the RTX 5060 and every other RTX 50-series card, the 5050 sticks to GDDR6 memory rather than GDDR7. This affects memory bandwidth, with 320GB/sec versus 448GB/sec for the 5060, but AMD's Radeon RX 9000-series cards all stick with GDDR6 and still deliver competitive performance with RTX 50-series products at similar price points.