Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5060 Ti and vanilla RTX 5060 announcement today officially marks the end of the Blackwell RTX 50-series GPU launch — the first stage, at least. Second-stage refreshes will likely happen early next year, and if our guess is correct, we'll probably see 24Gb (3GB) GDDR7 modules on all of the cards, providing 50% more VRAM across the full suite. But for now, we have the RTX 5060 Ti in both 16GB and 8GB trim, along with the RTX 5060 with 8GB of memory.
Tomorrow, Nvidia will release the RTX 5060 Ti cards, with the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB starting at $429 and the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB starting at $379. That means Nvidia is only charging $50 extra to double your VRAM, and frankly, if those prices and that price gap hold, there's little reason to opt for the cheaper GPU. Numerous games can already run into memory issues with 8GB, and that number will only increase in the future.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First, we have the full RTX 5060 series specifications, with comparisons to the prior generation RTX 4060 series.
All three 5060 variants use the same GB206 processor. It has a maximum of 36 SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors), with all 36 enabled on the 5060 Ti. The vanilla RTX 5060 trims the SM count down to 30, with slightly lower GPU clocks, 25% less L2 cache enabled, and an increase in TGP (Total Graphics Power).
Compared to the prior generation 4060 class GPUs, the 5060 class models provide more SMs and GPU shaders for all variants, with official launch MSRPs that are either the same (for the 5060) or cheaper (for the 5060 Ti). Note that we list the launch prices, so the 4060 Ti 16GB gets saddled with a difficult-to-justify $499 price tag. Nvidia later dropped that to $449, which means the new 5060 Ti models are, in reality, only $20 cheaper. Still, potentially faster hardware with new features for a lower price isn't a bad start.
It's worth pointing out that all the RTX 5060 class cards will feature a PCIe 5.0 x8 link, with a physical x16 slot connector. With a PCIe 5.0 platform, that means the new cards will have the same interface bandwidth as PCIe 4.0 x16. Even so, we don't foresee the PCI Express interface as being a significant concern. If you put a 5060 into a PCIe 3.0 slot, perhaps you'll lose a few percent in performance, but generally speaking games and most graphics workloads run best when they're in VRAM. Maybe AI workloads could benefit from the faster link speeds, but testing elsewhere has shown that even the RTX 5090 only loses a tiny fraction of its gaming performance potential in a PCIe 4.0 slot.
The lime green elephant in the corner wants a word about those prices, however. Even though the recent U.S. tariffs are on pause for GPUs, new tariffs could be announced... well, basically at any time. There's a lot of uncertainty. Moreover, even without the tariffs, there's a huge question on supply and availability for all of the latest generation graphics cards. There's only so much TSMC 5nm-class manufacturing available (which includes the 4N process node used by Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs), and there's still a massive demand for more compute from the AI sector. The result has been inflated GPU prices on everything.
Nvidia claims to have shipped twice as many Blackwell RTX GPUs in the first five weeks (compared to the prior gen Ada RTX 40-series GPUs), but it hasn't provided any data on how many GPUs have actually shipped, and that initial five week windows omits the 4080, 4070 Ti, and 4070 GPU launches. All you need to do is look at GPU prices to see that most models aren't in stock at anything close to MSRP. We don't expect the RTX 5060 series to buck that trend.
