The 5060 Ti stacks up against the other cards basically where you’d expect performance-wise, but it’s important to remember this is both the 16-GB variant and an overclocked model. The performance is just good enough for consistent 1080p at 60 fps that I expect you’ll have to compromise on settings with the 8-GB models. I’ll wait until I have them in hand to make a firm conclusion, but I imagine that is the lowest-performance card in the 50 Series that will be acceptable for modern games.
Frames for Free
I’ve discussed Nvidia’s new multiframe generation tech in the other GPU reviews, which uses machine learning to create extra frames between the “real” rendered frames. On the high-end cards, multiframe generation was the only way to achieve high-refresh 4K gaming, but on this card it’s more useful for getting consistently smooth gameplay at high-refresh 1080p, or getting over 60 fps at 1440p.
Photograph: Brad Bourque
In Cyberpunk 2077, I was able to turn all the settings up except Path Tracing, and set Ray Tracing to “Psycho” and use Frame Generation to get up over 60 FPS. I imagine most people will turn it on as they tinker, see a huge boost to performance without a meaningful hit to the image quality, and use it forever.
I don’t blame you for following their lead, and I think that with cinematic, single-player games in particular, you’ll have a great experience. If you play a lot of fast-paced shooters or twitchy games, you’ll probably want to drop your settings instead.
Anecdotally, the sentiment in my gaming nerd circles is that people aren’t even remotely interested in paying over $1,000 for a graphics card. Even if GPUs were closer to their suggested retail price, they don’t want to spend that much to get a system up and running. Frame generation could be the thing to squeeze some more life out of these cards while still saving some cash, even if it’s technically a compromise. If you already own a decent 1080p card, there likely isn’t a reason to upgrade, but if your older RTX 20 or 30 series card is on the fritz, and you can snag of of these for retail, it’s a worthwhile gaming companion. Otherwise, check out our list of the Best GPUs for even more options.
