Nvidia has announced GeForce RTX 5050 GPUs for both desktops and laptops with support for ray tracing and DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation.
On the desktop side, the RTX 5050 will start at $249, draw up to 130W of power, and feature 8GB of last-gen GDDR6 video memory (VRAM) and 2,560 Blackwell CUDA cores. The cards will be made by third-party partners like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac, and others, with expected shipments in the second half of July. Nvidia’s Game Ready Drivers are expected to receive an update for compatibility with the new cards in early July.
The RTX 5050 laptop GPU will draw 35W to 100W of power and use 8GB of GDDR7 VRAM and 2,560 Blackwell CUDA cores. Laptops running a 5050 GPU are expected to start at $999, with availability of some models beginning today. Early models launching before Nvidia’s Game Ready Drivers are released will have drivers for the 5050 GPU pre-installed. GDDR7 VRAM is more power efficient than GDDR6, allowing the laptop version of the 5050 to fit into slimmer notebooks without getting quite as hot.
The choice to go with GDDR6 on the desktop cards feels like an odd one, even though it should outperform the laptop version with GDDR7. The desktop RTX 5050 matches the RTX 5060 with 8GB of VRAM, but being GDDR6 and having 1,280 fewer CUDA cores ensures it should have a noticeable gap in performance with the card directly above it.
Nvidia is claiming the 5050 will be able to deliver “an immersive ray-traced experience with high settings in single-player games such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Avowed, thanks to DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation.” Its chart shows the 5050 achieving over 150 fps in that scenario with 4x MFG turned on. However, keep in mind that the fine print indicates that’s all while the GPU was paired with a $479 AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU running at 1080p resolution. In full raster, Nvidia claims the RTX 5050 is about 60 percent faster than the two-generations-old RTX 3050.
The RTX 5050 is the direct replacement of that RTX 3050, which remains one of the most popular GPUs in use on Steam. Nvidia never announced a desktop RTX 4050.
