I had a feeling we might be in for a bumpy ride with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 when I was told there wouldn't be a press driver available in advance of the release. Why would Nvidia not want reviews ready at launch? Based on my testing, the simple answer is that this new GPU doesn't have enough VRAM to play one of the latest games at high settings at just 1,920 x 1,080.
I've had the chance to test a RTX 4060, and it has the benefits of multi-frame gen too, but it simply doesn't have enough memory to cope with one of the latest blockbuster games.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 benchmarks
I'll start with the real kicker for the RTX 5060, which is Bethesda's Indy game. This super-demanding release came out at the end of 2024, and the RTX 5090 review, but the RTX 5060 can't even run it at the High graphics preset without any path tracing, even at just 1,920 x 1,080.
As standard, I run this game at the Ultra preset without any of the Full RT features when I test every graphics card. As a point of comparison, my Nvidia DLSS upscaling or frame gen, thanks to its large frame buffer. However, the RTX 5060 completely fell over at these settings at 1080p, running the game at just 23fps, and enabling DLSS and frame gen didn't help either, as the starting frame rate was so unreliable, making the game choppy and stuttery in action.
To make matters worse, dropping down to the High graphics preset resulted in exactly the same problem, with choppy action and 1% lows of just 13fps, with an average of 41fps. Even dropping to the Medium preset results in a warning in the graphics menu saying there isn't enough VRAM.
In the end, the only preset that didn't result in a VRAM warning was Low, and even that gets a warning if you enable DLSS. Thankfully, the game still doesn't look terrible at this setting, and the RTX 5060 averages a decent 110fps. However, playing one of the latest games at 1080p with low settings is mightily disappointing for a brand-new $299 GPU.
On the plus side, one game that is normally very demanding on the memory front does at least run at max settings on the RTX 5060. I've seen Doom Eternal fall over on 8GB cards if you enable ray tracing with the Ultra Nightmare settings, even at 1080p, but the RTX 5060 manages to cope with it.
At these settings, the RTX 5060 averages 185fps with 96fps 1% lows, but the graphics menu showed that these settings were right on the edge, using 7,563MB out of the 7,807MB available. Comparatively, the 16GB RTX 5060 Ti averages 278fps in this test, with a much higher 1% low of 187fps, despite only having slightly more GPU power, suggesting that the RTX 5060 would be quicker if it had a little more memory.
It's not all bad news. If you play a game on the RTX 5060 that doesn't push the VRAM to its limit, then the new GPU is actually pretty decent. If you run Cyberpunk 2077 at 1,920 x 1,080 with the Ultra ray tracing preset, for example, then enable DLSS on the Balanced setting (which still looks good using the new Transformer model), the frame rate averages 85fps. That's a solid enough baseline to enable multi-frame gen, pushing the frame rate up to a super-smooth 231fps.
Of course, not every game needs 8GB of VRAM to run at decent settings, and I'm confident that the RTX 5060 will run most of the games in our test suite at 1080p. However, we've clearly already hit that bottleneck in one game, and that situation is only going to get worse over the next few years. In of future proofing, the RTX 5060 looks like it could struggle to deliver the goods throughout its lifetime, unless you're prepared to drop your settings. That's a shame, as the GPU itself looks pretty powerful for the money.
I'll be running the full PCGamesN benchmark suite on the RTX 5060 over the next few days, and I'll publish a review at a later date, but one conclusion is already clear right now – this card already has one game that it struggles to play at 1,920 x 1,080.
In the meantime, check out our guide to the how to install a GPU, where I take you through the whole graphics card fitting process.
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