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Leaked GeForce RTX 5060 and 5050 specs suggest Nvidia will keep playing it safe

Nvidia's 50-series refresh has been pretty conservative so far.

Andrew Cunningham – | 115
A PNY GeForce RTX 4060. Leaked specs suggest that the 5060 cards will continue in a similar vein. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
A PNY GeForce RTX 4060. Leaked specs suggest that the 5060 cards will continue in a similar vein. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Nvidia has launched all of the GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs that it announced at CES, at least technically—whether you're buying from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, it's nearly impossible to find any of these new cards at their advertised prices right now.

But hope springs eternal, and newly leaked specs for GeForce RTX 5060 and 5050-series cards suggest that Nvidia may be announcing these lower-end cards soon. These kinds of cards are rarely exciting, but Steam Hardware Survey data shows that these xx60 and xx50 cards are what the overwhelming majority of PC gamers are putting in their systems.

The specs, posted by a reliable leaker named Kopite and reported by Tom's Hardware and others, suggest a refresh that's in line with what Nvidia has done with most of the 50-series so far. Along with a move to the next-generation Blackwell architecture, the 5060 GPUs each come with a small increase to the number of CUDA cores, a jump from GDDR6 to GDDR7, and an increase in power consumption, but no changes to the amount of memory or the width of the memory bus. The 8GB versions, in particular, will probably continue to be marketed primarily as 1080p cards.

Ars Video

 

RTX 5060 Ti (leaked) RTX 4060 Ti RTX 5060 (leaked) RTX 4060 RTX 5050 (leaked) RTX 3050
CUDA Cores 4,608 4,352 3,840 3,072 2,560 2,560
Boost Clock Unknown 2,535 MHz Unknown 2,460 MHz Unknown 1,777 MHz
Memory Bus Width 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit
Memory bandwidth Unknown 288 GB/s Unknown 272 GB/s Unknown 224 GB/s
Memory size 8GB or 16GB GDDR7 8GB or 16GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR7 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6
TGP 180 W 160 W 150 W 115 W 130 W 130 W

As with the 4060 Ti, the 5060 Ti is said to come in two versions, one with 8GB of RAM and one with 16GB. One of the 4060 Ti's problems was that its relatively narrow 128-bit memory bus limited its performance at 1440p and 4K resolutions even with 16GB of RAM—the bandwidth increase from GDDR7 could help with this, but we'll need to test to see for sure.

For the RTX 5050—Nvidia's first xx50 desktop GPU since the RTX 3050 launched in January 2022—the update is more significant because of the skipped generation. The 130 W power budget stays the same, and the budget-minded card will reportedly stick with GDDR6 instead of GDDR7. But it's also said to include the same number of CUDA cores as the RTX 3050, which would mean it would be relying more heavily on architectural improvements and clock speed bumps for its performance increase.

We'd expect the 5060-series cards to be priced close to the retail pricing for the 4060 series, for better or worse—$300 for the 4060, $400 for the 8GB 4060 Ti, and somewhere in the $450 to $500 range for the 16GB 5060 Ti. The RTX 3050 currently sells for $200 or less, but it launched at $249 when it was introduced.

AMD hasn't said much about its next-generation Radeon RX 9060 series cards, except to suggest on a slide during a CES presentation that they exist. Intel's contenders in this price category are the recently launched Arc B580 and B570, though neither card has been easy to buy at its $249 or $219 MSRP.

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Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter
Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.
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