Nvidia Launches Budget-Friendly GeForce RTX 5050

Nvidia has officially added a new entry to its 50-series lineup, the GeForce RTX 5050, starting at $249 and set to hit shelves in the second half of July.

As the most compact and affordable member of the RTX 50-series, this GPU is designed for gamers and creators seeking next-gen performance on a budget.

The RTX 5050 is built on Nvidia’s latest Blackwell architecture, featuring the GB207 die and 2560 CUDA cores, roughly two-thirds of what the RTX 5060 offers. This card brings the 5th generation Tensor cores and 4th generation RT cores into play, enabling support for features like DLSS4 with multi-frame generation and the upcoming Reflex 2, promising smoother gameplay and reduced latency.

With a base clock speed of 2.31GHz and a boost of up to 2.57GHz, the RTX 5050 is paired with 128-bit 8GB GDDR6 memory, making it the only 50-series card without GDDR7 so far. Despite this, it holds its own in performance, and Nvidia claims it is 60% faster on average in raster compared to the RTX 3050, and even comes close to RTX 4060 levels in certain benchmarks.

Designed to Connect and Encode with Ease

Connectivity is comprehensive, with 3x DisplayPort 2.1b and 1x HDMI 2.1b, while media professionals can benefit from a 9th-generation NVENC encoder and a 6th-generation NVDEC decoder. It requires 130W of power and supports either a single 8-pin connector or a 300W+ PCIe Gen 5 cable.

There won’t be a Founders Edition of the RTX 5050 from Nvidia itself, but the card will be widely available from ASUS, Colorful, Gainward, Galaxy, GIGABYTE, INNO3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and ZOTAC.

In addition to the desktop card, a mobile version of the RTX 5050 is already shipping today in laptops starting at $999, offering next-gen GPU performance on the go.

Gamers looking to upgrade this summer with a balance of price and performance will find the RTX 5050 a strong contender in the mid-range GPU space.