Author: James Archer
Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 5060 Solo specs:
CUDA Cores: 3840
Base Clock Speed: 2.28GHz
Boost Clock Speed: 2.49GHz
VRAM: 8GB GDDR7
Power: 145W
Recommended System Power: 550W
Price: From £270 / $299
I’d so desperately like to do a graphics card review without the fug of a wider controversy (or cacked-up market conditions), but the RTX 50 series hasn’t been particularly cooperative in that regard, so why should the RTX 5060 be any different? This time, the sadness cloud comes wafting from Nvidia themselves, amid accusations of engineering dodgy RTX 5060 previews and attempting to trade access for greater coverage of its Multi Frame Generation (MFG) capability.
AMD have rocked up to this year’s Computex tech conference with a handful of new Ryzen Threadripper CPUs (not interested) and confirmation of a long-rumoured graphics card, the Radeon RX 9060 XT (cautiously interested). It’s a true mid-ranger in the RTX 5060 Ti vein, and like its Nvidia rival, will launch with both 8GB and 16GB versions – the latter of which will cost $349, the lowest MSRP of any current-gen 16GB gaming GPU, upon its release in June.
In classic me fashion, I swanned off for a few days just as another graphics card fracas has spilled out into public view. At the centre this time is the previously unassuming RTX 5060, which you may have noticed is due for launch today yet only has a handful of “hands-on previews” to tell you how big of a graphics it does. Allegedly, that’s because Nvidia have been keeping hold of the drivers needed for full reviews, only providing them at the eleventh hour to press outlets that have previously run these previews. No preview? No review, at least until the drivers release publicly later today, and what’s more, the same reports say that these previews were only offered under strict testing provisos set by Nvidia themselves.
According to VideoCardz and Hardware Unboxed, the mandated test conditions supposedly range from only allowing certain games for benchmarking – judging from the previews currently online, these were Doom: The Dark Ages, Avowed, Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy and Marvel Rivals – to the more egregious demand that RTX 5060 performance figures would focus on DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation (MFG). And, in turn, would only be compared to results from older XX60 GPUs that lack DLSS frame gen support entirely.