The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 is the slowest Blackwell card in the lineup and due to its high price tag of $249, we recommend going for these GPUs instead.
At $249, the GeForce RTX 5050 is one of the most poorly priced products in the RTX 50 lineup. Despite offering 8 GB of VRAM, the GPU lacks competitive specs for its price tag. While the $200-$300 price tag doesn’t really have a lot of GPUs from the current gen, there are still a few excellent choices that offer better value than the RTX 5050. The Reason Why GeForce RTX 5050 Sucks and Why You Shouldn’t Buy One
There is no bad product, but bad pricing, and GeForce RTX 5050 is a perfect example of this. The RTX 5050 follows the path of the previous 50-class cards and resembles a lot in specifications to the RTX 3050 from the Ampere family. Of course, there is a big performance difference between the two, but when it comes to the pricing for a similar configuration, the RTX 5050 brings nothing new to the table, except for the architecture, and a newer gen for RT and Tensor cores.
The RTX 3050 flopped hard due to its high price tag of $249 when the RTX 3060 was already available for $329. The RTX 5050 is in an even worse position due to the availability of the RTX 5060 for $299. The GPU brings no shader count increase over the past two generations, and even the VRAM remained GDDR6 (even though it’s a bit faster). What’s worse is its performance, as it fails to defeat even the previous-gen RTX 4060 and the RX 7600, which you may find for lower prices, particularly in the used GPU market. Bump up the resolution to 1440p, and it even loses to the RTX 3060, which is shameful.
Nonetheless, it’s not that the more powerful budget GPUs from the current gen don’t have any flaws, but they are still far superior in most of their specifications and performance.
