Nvidia announces GeForce RTX 5050 gaming GPU, starts from $249

Nvidia has unveiled its latest entry-level gaming GPU, the GeForce RTX 5050, bringing its new Blackwell architecture to a wider audience. According to an official statement by the company, the GPU will be available in desktop and laptop variants, priced from $249 and $999 respectively.

The GeForce RTX 5050 desktop graphics cards are set to launch in the second half of July. The cards will come from board partners including ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, and others, and will also be featured in pre-built desktops. Drawing a maximum of 130 watts and powered by a single PCIe 8-pin cable, the GPU is designed to run on systems with 550-watt power supplies.

Desktop RTX 5050 cards are equipped with 2,560 CUDA cores, 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus, and feature Nvidia's 5th generation AI Tensor Cores, 4th generation ray tracing cores, and 9th generation encoder (NVENC), with a minimum 2.31 GHz base clock speed. According to Nvidia, the new GPU offers a 60% performance improvement in rasterisation and up to 4x faster performance with DLSS 4 compared to the RTX 3050.

Laptops with the RTX 5050 GPU are now available starting at $999. These models include 8 GB of GDDR7 memory running at 24 Gbps, with improvements in energy efficiency and thermal management that allow for thinner and lighter devices, says Nvidia. Laptop GPUs feature the same core specifications as the desktop variant and are aimed at delivering improved performance while maintaining quiet and cool operation.

Nvidia's RTX 5050 targets gamers upgrading from older GPUs like the GTX 1650 or RTX 3050, offering modern features like DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, ray tracing, and support for over 800 accelerated games and applications. A new Game Ready Driver with RTX 5050 support is expected to launch in early July.