Nvidia’s cheapest 2025 graphics card might just be its most important

Nvidia has announced the GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti desktop graphics cards, which the company hopes will tempt owners of its previous budget-friendly GPUs to upgrade. In terms of specs, these are the least capable of the still-tough-to-buy RTX 50-series graphics card lineup, although they should still be pretty solid for 1080p gaming. That’s because, in addition to boasting more CUDA cores, ray tracing cores, and Tensor AI cores than previous generations, they come with DLSS 4 enhancements, which include Multi Frame Generation to greatly boost frame rates in games that support the feature.

Thankfully, their prices seem to be in line with their budget-minded capabilities. The RTX 5060 will launch in May for $299, while the slightly more powerful RTX 5060 Ti is launching on April 16 in two configurations with different amounts of video memory, 8 GB and 16 GB, which will cost $379 and $429, respectively. Notably, there will not be Founders Edition versions of any RTX 5060 cards from Nvidia, only ones made by third parties.

The RTX 5060 will provide a hefty performance boost over the RTX 3060, according to Nvidia. The RTX 3060 is the most popular graphics card among Steam users, followed by its successor, the RTX 4060. The new GPUs will be much better at running games that support the DLSS Transformer AI model. Games like Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, Alan Wake 2, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows will look sharper, exhibit fewer visual artifacts, and run faster. It’s worth noting that the RTX 3060 doesn’t support DLSS 4 or frame generation, though the RTX 4060 at least supports frame generation.

The RTX 5060 series isn’t nearly as flashy as Nvidia’s pricier cards, but it’s an important launch nevertheless. For one, as mentioned earlier, it’s built to replace some of Nvidia’s most popular (and affordable) GPUs. Also, it comes after Nvidia’s launch of the $549 RTX 5070, which the company claimed at CES 2025 to be faster than the RTX 4090. That was disproven by our pals at The Verge. That GPU traded blows with AMD’s more impressive (yet similarly priced) Radeon RX 9070 graphics card, which The Verge said in its review “comfortably beats Nvidia’s RTX 5070 at both 4K and 1440p.” So, while Nvidia might rule the $299 GPU price point for now, we’ll have to wait and see if that’s the case for long.

In case you’re wondering how the RTX 5060 Ti stacks up to the 5070, perhaps some specs might tell you all you need to hear to make a buying decision. The 5060 Ti has 26% fewer Tensor cores, 26% fewer ray tracing cores, and 28% fewer CUDA cores, plus lower memory bandwidth (192-bit vs. 128-bit). Compared to the previous-generation RTX 4060 Ti, the 5060 Ti sports just a 5% increase in CUDA cores, but a whopping 73% more Tensor cores, and a 34% increase in ray tracing cores.