NVIDIA Readies RTX 5050 with 8GB GDDR6, But Who Exactly Needs This After the RTX 5060 Debacle

According to insiders, NVIDIA is preparing a desktop GeForce RTX 5050 for a July launch. The card will be the most affordable in the Blackwell lineup, but its specifications—particularly the 8GB of GDDR6 — are already causing confusion in the wake of recent criticism over the same capacity on the more powerful RTX 5060.

The RTX 5050 is based on the GB207-300 chip, featuring 2560 CUDA cores. That's 33% fewer cores than the RTX 5060 (3840 cores) and it pairs them with 8GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus. This is a key difference from the rest of the RTX 5000 series using GDDR7, and even from the mobile RTX 5050, which uses GDDR7 for better power efficiency. Its rated TDP is 130W.

The choice to equip the RTX 5050 with aging GDDR6 (offering ~288 GB/s bandwidth at typical 18 Gb/s speeds) instead of GDDR7 looks questionable. This is especially true considering that the RTX 5060, with its 8GB of the latest GDDR7 (448 GB/s), was already slammed by reviewers and enthusiasts. The criticism focused on 8GB — even on fast GDDR7 — becoming a bottleneck in many modern games at high settings, especially above 1080p resolution.

Releasing an even weaker card (the RTX 5050) with even slower memory and the same 8GB capacity in mid-2025 seems like a head-scratching move to many in the community. Who exactly is this card for, and what tasks is it meant to handle, if its memory limitations will be even more pronounced than those of the already-criticized RTX 5060? An official announcement is expected in the coming weeks, with sales starting in July, possibly alongside the mobile version.