Yesterday’s launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 laptop GPU was quiet, yet nonetheless featured a surprise: there’s also a desktop version of the RTX 5050, set to release (exclusively in third-party garb – there’s no Founders Edition) in “the second half” of July. Quite the turnaround for the non-laptop XX50 lineage, which was widely assumed extinguished following 2022’s RTX 3050.
The RTX 5050 will replace the RTX 5060 as the cheapest of Nvidia’s current-gen desktop GPUs, starting at $249. Budget buyers will need to make do with 8GB of last-gen GDDR6 VRAM, however, as well as a lighter smattering of CUDA cores: 2,560 to the RTX 5060’s 3,840. There’s obviously no desktop RTX 4050 to compare these specs to, though next to the RTX 3050, it does offer more memory bandwidth even if the total gigabyte count remains the same. Presumably there are also performance advantages, especially where ray tracing is concerned, that the RTX 5050 can glean from its updated Blackwell architecture.
‘Course, while the RTX 5050 might make for a decent upgrade for current 3050 owners – especially those interested in DLSS 4 and frame generation – its $249 price tag does keep it nervily close to the $300 RTX 5060. Which, even with its driver issues, really isn’t a bad 1080p card itself, so we’ll have to see what the 5050 can do to coexist with its more core-rich, wider-bandwidth big brother.
I’ll admit, there’s a not-small part of me that hopes it can. We can raise eyebrows at the specifications and make “Fnar fnar new GTX 1030” jokes until our typing fingers are worn down to stumps, but there genuinely are vast numbers of PC players who are happy with below-max quality 1080p yet can’t reliably stretch to mid-rangers like the XX60 series. People, in other words, who haven’t been adequately served by the GPU market in years. Arguably since even before the RTX 3050, what with that GPU launching during the dark times of COVID-compounded shortages and price gouging.
Will the RTX 5050 fill that gap? I won’t know until I’ve tested one out. But I’d rather it ends up as a failed attempt, than a repeat of the RTX 40 series’ failing to try at all.
