I've just hit a big snag with my plan to test the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 next week, as it turns out I won't actually be able to publish a review of Team Jensen's new $299 graphics card before it comes out. That's because Nvidia has taken the extraordinary step not to issue the press with a pre-release driver. In fact, an Nvidia rep just told me that the first driver I'll be able to use is the public one that comes out on May 19, which is the GPU's launch day.
Nvidia hasn't given me its reasoning for the decision, but it looks like a big flag covered in bright red dye to me. Does RTX 5060 release date if they actually know how it performs? Has Nvidia realized that this 8GB GPU is likely to fall over in some of the latest games at top settings, making its $299 price look a bit silly? I genuinely can't think of a single good reason why you'd refuse to give the press a driver so they can test it before release.
I'll tell you what I think has happened, though. As I found in my RTX 5070 review, because the more expensive card only has 12GB of VRAM. Recent tests of the 8GB RTX 5060 Ti have also painted a picture of a card that's severely bottlenecked by its lack of memory, as you can see in the video from Hardware Unboxed below.
Meanwhile, the Intel Arc B580 has 12GB of memory and can be readily Radeon RX 9060 XT soon. If the 16GB 9060 XT is priced in the same ballpark as the RTX 5060, then Nvidia's new budget GPU could be in some real trouble.
After seeing how badly the 8GB RTX 5060 Ti has been received by the press, it's reasonable to ask whether the brakes have been put on the RTX 5060 driver to prevent the new 8GB RTX 5060 from getting a similar pasting. Given the big disparity between supply and demand of the latest GPUs right now, particularly in the US, such a strategy may even work.
Nvidia's GeForce brand is massive, and its GPUs have regularly been selling out on launch day. Many gamers may well be happy to buy the latest budget GPU with a bigger number than 4060 in the model name as soon as it comes out, based on Nvidia's reputation alone.
But I strongly advise that you wait until you see the performance figures before you make a purchase, and that you also wait and see how the rumored AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT performs. Nvidia may be able to delay performance data from being released, but I'll find out how it holds up in our benchmark suite as soon as I can.
The RTX 5060 has a good 25% bump in the number of CUDA cores over its predecessor, the RTX 4060, so I'm hoping it will offer a decent step up in rendering power, and it will also Nvidia's new multi frame gen tech. However, that 8GB of VRAM is likely to let it down in demanding game tests, especially at that $299 price in 2025.
In the meantime, check out our guide to the how to install a GPU as well.
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