Introduction

NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 5050 late last month, with driver and market availability cited as "later in July." However, the drivers appeared much earlier—this week, and we were able to request a review sample from Gigabyte—their RTX 5050 Gaming OC. The RTX 5050 forms NVIDIA's new entry-level graphics card, and is a long-overdue replacement for the GeForce RTX 3050. If you recall, the company did not release a successor to RTX 3050 with the RTX 40-series, making this RTX 5050 an important product. This is more so because it comes in at a starting price of $250, making it the most affordable modern-tech NVIDIA product on the market—cheaper than game consoles. It also has minimal power and case requirements, and so can be leveraged to transform any mom-and-pop office system into a gaming PC. The RTX 5050 is designed to offer sufficient performance for high quality gaming at 1080p. You should definitely make use of the feature set DLSS offers, to achieve a good compromise between framerates and eye candy.



The GeForce RTX 5050 is based on the latest Blackwell graphics architecture, and gains prominence over its predecessor, the RTX 3050, because it supports DLSS Frame Generation, and the latest Multi Frame Generation feature NVIDIA launched alongside DLSS 4. This technology also sees a replacement of older upscaler models driven by convoluted neural networks (CNNs) with the newer Transformer-based model. There is a significant upgrade in image quality, so much so, that even in games where the GPU is able to manage over 60 FPS at native resolution, you'd want to use DLSS Quality or DLAA instead of TAA.

The GeForce Blackwell architecture introduces a revolutionary new concept in 3D graphics, called Neural Rendering. It leverages generative AI models to create objects in real time, and combines them with conventional raster 3D much in the same way it combines ray traced objects. The power of generative AI to create photorealistic objects needs no introduction, so you know the potential of Neural Rendering in upcoming games that are designed to use it. This technology relies on a hardware scheduler that allows the GPU to both render graphics and run AI models in tandem, called the AI Management Processor (AMP). The new 4th generation RT cores of Blackwell introduce support for Mega Geometry, or the ability for ray traced objects to have much higher geometric detail, and for all those added triangles to correctly interact with rays.

The GeForce RTX 5050 introduces a new silicon, the GB207. This is the company's smallest chip based on Blackwell, and is built on the same NVIDIA 4N foundry node derived from TSMC N5, as the RTX 40-series Ada chips. The GB207 is smaller than the AD107 that NVIDIA used to build the RTX 4060 with. GB207 has just the right SM count tailored for the RTX 5050 SKU. It comes with 20 streaming multiprocessors (SM), which are all enabled on the RTX 5050. This works out to 2,560 CUDA cores, 80 Tensor cores, 20 RT cores, 80 TMUs, and 32 ROPs.

RTX 5050 comes with 8 GB of memory across a 128-bit wide memory bus, which may seem same as the RTX 5060, but this is the only SKU in the RTX 50-series to implement older generation GDDR6. The card comes with 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory, which works out to 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth over the 128-bit memory bus. The GPU implements PCI-Express Gen 5 like the rest of the Blackwell series, and comes with a PCI-Express 5.0 x8 host interface, just like the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti. The reference GPU boost frequency is 2572 MHz, however, the Gigabyte RTX 5050 Gaming OC comes with a factory overclock of 2632 MHz. The card has a TGP of just 130 W, and so a single 8-pin PCIe power input is plenty, even for overclocked cards. Gigabyte has priced the RTX 5050 Gaming OC at $275, noticeably higher than the baseline MSRP of $250.