Specs for Nvidia’s new RTX 5050, 5060, and 5060 Ti GPUs leak out and that 5060 might actually be half decent. If it’s priced right

Arguably the most reliable GPU info leaker of them all, Kopite7kimi, has dropped a load of specs for Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 5050, RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti GPUs. And the RTX 5060 actually looks like it might be half decent. Well, it could be depending on how much it will cost and if you can actually buy one at a non-inflated price.

Let’s kick off with that RTX 5060, which could be announced as soon as March 13. Kopite7kimi says it will rock 3,840 CUDA cores. That’s a reasonable 25% boost in pure core count over the RTX 4060’s 3,072 cores. You might expect a bit of a clock speed jump, too, and Kopite7kimi says the card will use GDDR7 for a bandwidth step. Add it all up and if this unofficial leak is accurate the RTX 5060 could end up in excess of 30% quicker than the RTX 4060.

As this generation of Nvidia GPUs goes, that would be a very large boost, SKU to SKU. But what of the other rumoured RTX 50 GPUs? Perhaps inevitably, the RTX 5060 Ti is said to be less impressive.

Kopite7kimi says it will get 4,608 CUDA cores, up just 6% over the RTX 4060 Ti’s 4,352 cores. The main impact of all that is a much smaller gap between the ’60 and ’60 Ti variants this time around. And that in turn could well make the non-Ti GPU the pick for this generation, depending on pricing.

For the RTX 40-series, the RTX 4060 was MSRP’d at $299, the RTX 4060 Ti was $399 and the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB was $499. If we dare hope that Nvidia goes with $299 for the non-Ti RTX 5060, then you could be looking at a GPU with RTX 4060 Ti performance for RTX 4060 non-Ti pricing.

Oh, speaking of the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB, the RTX 5060 Ti is said to be once again available in both 8 GB and 16 GB variants, with the RTX 5060 non-Ti only offered as an 8 GB card. In terms of MSRPs, the RTX 5070 has been pitched at $549, so it’s hard to imagine the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB at $499 given the RTX 5070 offers a very large jump up to 6,144 CUDA cores.

But then all kinds of things happen in the GPU market that you might not expect. What, then, of the final GPU in this stack, the RTX 5050? That’s a trickier one as there was no RTX 4050 desktop GPU.

Kopite7kimi says the RTX 5050 gets 2,560 CUDA cores, which puts it on par with the RTX 4050 laptop GPU for core count. Presumably it will clock a bit higher than a lowest-spec Ada laptop chip, but the performance with that kind of core count will obviously be modest.

Again, it will come down to price. If that mooted RTX 5050 is cheap enough, it could be an interesting entry-level GPU. The question is, will it be cheap enough and will you be able to buy it?

As for how all this fits in with AMD, it has said that it will release the new Radeon RX 9060 and RX 9060 XT cards later this year. For now, specs like core counts aren’t clear, though the latest rumours suggest the RX 9060 XT will align with the RTX 5060 Ti in having a 128-bit memory bus and being offered in 8 GB and 16 GB variants.

Overall, the reasonably positive upshot is that there might actually be something to look forward to in the lower echelons of the GPU market in the coming months. $300 might buy you something half decent, fingers crossed…