Surprisingly It’s Not The 8GB That Has Reviewers Up In Arms
The RTX 5060 arrived in stores yesterday but you won’t see a lot of traditional reviews of the card thanks to NVIDIA’s mandated test conditions for previews and reviews. The card itself is a decent performer at 1080p, generally over 20% faster than the RTX 4060 it is replacing and a hair faster than the RTX 4060 Ti overall. That is only based off of Guru 3D’s review, of course, and as more sites test it with the ‘proper’ release driver we will have a better idea of how the RTX 5060 handles a variety of systems and games. That’s not too shabby for a card that is supposed to start at $299, which is $100 lower than the RTX 4060 Ti launched at. Unfortunately, with the market the way it is you are unlikely to actually see that price any time soon.
When tested at 1440p and higher the 8GB of RAM shows it’s limitations, as it simply doesn’t have enough memory onboard to handle large textures. However the RTX 5060 has a secret weapon, DLSS 4.0, which allows it to handle higher resolutions but is also the cause of the discontent being vented by many review sites. When you enable DLSS 4 and Frame Generation x4 you go from disappointing 1440p performance to a fully playable and enjoyable experience.
In games which NVIDIA optimized their newest version of Adaptive Super Sampling, such as Cyberpunk 2077 you will see immense performance improvements; Guru 3D went from 11fps to 111fps at 1440p with ray tracing cranked up. Normally that would garner Gold Awards or the equivalent, but unfortunately NVIDIA squandered the good will of reviewers with the conditions they demanded for access to the full driver so they could publish reviews yesterday. If you wanted the driver before it was publicly available you had to agree to a very strict testing regime. You can read about the requirements at Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN or Tom’s Hardware.
Now that both the card and driver are available to everyone we shall start to see more reviews, but it will take a few days for sites to properly test the RTX 5060 and you can expect a little snarkiness in the content.