Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 review: better than console performance - but not enough VRAM

With our testing complete, the RTX 5060 is a mixed bag. Its raw performance across RT and non-RT titles is fairly impressive for its $299 MSRP, at times resembling the RTX 3060 Ti and more often the RTX 4060 Ti in terms of frame-rate averages - and that's without any form of frame generation, of course. On the AMD side, this is roughly RX 6800 levels of performance at 1440p, or a bit more at 1080p.

However, the 8GB VRAM is simply not enough to guarantee a flawless gaming experience in 2025, let alone three or four years down the road when the next console generation kicks off. Games like Monster Hunter Wilds and Indiana Jones really need 12GB of memory to run as intended, while others work well enough with RT disabled, but struggle when these features are turned on - Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is a good example here. Frame generation can also add to the VRAM burden.

With that in mind, the RTX 5060 feels imbalanced, with a relative surfeit of raw performance and good features held back by the miserly VRAM allocation. Upgrading to a new graphics card ought to mean that you can tackle the latest games, but here there's a sense that you're almost entering a lottery with each new title. You could get a great experience out of the box, or you could have to go through a gauntlet of lowering texture settings and disabling RT features - the ones you might have upgraded to see! - before the game runs as you'd like. The idea of Nvidia bringing RT to the mainstream but not enough memory to run it on key games is very, very short-sighted.

For the sake of argument, if you're not bothered by the limited VRAM - eg you don't tend to play games at launch when they're at their least optimised; the game genres you prefer are less likely to include RT features; or you're generally happy to play around with settings until you get a good experience - then the RTX 5060 does have its strengths.

For instance - based on our calculations, the RTX 5060 is the best value graphics card for 1080p gaming, a title that it holds over AMD's RX 9070 and 9070 XT by a reasonable margin - at 4.39 dollars per frame versus 4.65 and 4.62 for the Radeon duo, as measured across our full RT and non-RT test suite. That means the RTX 5070 is finally eclipsed in the Nvidia-only rankings, something the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB notably wasn't able to achieve. We generally hold that value should improve as you go down the stack, and that is indeed the case here.

The script flips if we take 1440p to be our resolution of choice, with the 9070 XT holding onto the lead, the vanilla 9070 coming second and the RTX 5060 holding down the final podium position. That means the 5060 still beats out our prior Nvidia champ, the RTX 5070, but it's fascinating to see Team Red take the lead here with more than double the frame-rate for twice the MSRP - and I'm sure having 16GB of VRAM on both AMD cards doesn't hurt.

Up until now, an RTX 60-class card has meant roughly console level performance - and in terms of compute, the 5060 enjoys a comfortable advantage over modern base consoles. Yet with 8GB of VRAM, you're not quite able to match the texture quality settings of the PS5 in more demanding titles; something like 10 or 12GB is a better match for console capabilities these days.

With that in mind, there's perhaps an argument to be made here that the naming of Nvidia's 50-series product stack has strayed somewhat from its historical tie points. After all, the RTX 3060 launched in 2021 for an inflation-adjusted ~$400 with 12GB of VRAM, an offering that more closely resembles the 5060 Ti 16GB at $430 than it does the 5060 8GB at $300.

In any case, the RTX 5060 is a graphics card that could have been something very decent - but ultimately falls short. We've been saying this for a few generations now, but Nvidia's next mainstream card ought to come with more VRAM and a full-size PCIe Express slot. The firm did it with the RTX 3060, so why downgrade its successors?

A GeForce RTX 5060 review unit was provided by Nvidia.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Analysis

• Introduction and test rig
• RT benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Cyberpunk 2077
• RT benchmarks: Dying Light 2, F1 24, Hitman: World of Assassination
• RT benchmarks: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Game benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong, Cyberpunk 2077
• Game benchmarks: F1 24, Forza Horizon 5, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2
• Game benchmarks: Hitman: World of Assassination, A Plague Tale: Requiem
• PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 5.0: Black Myth: Wukong, F1 24, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• PlayStation 5 comparisons and DLSS 4 multi frame generation
• Conclusions, value and recommendations [This Page]