Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti with Zotac, MSI and ASUS Review

Introduction and Technical Specifications

Introduction

Today sees the launch of the latest Nvidia Blackwell equipped card, the RTX 5060 Ti.

You probably already feel the same way we do. The way that we get excited about new graphics cards has largely been trampled down. Whether it’s the insanity of global finances making prices resemble Zimbabwean Hyperinflation or shelves being emptier than East Berlin, it’s difficult to get enthused. After all, just because we have a card in the office and a quote of a price doesn’t mean you all can actually buy one, and that if you do it costs what it’s promised to.

We’ve spent a long time in the office discussing what we can do. Do we throw up our arms and say what’s the point?  That seems counter-productive. After all we know people who got day one RTX 5070 Tis and at MSRP too. We know many people with RTX 5080s. Clearly cards exist. If that is the case we have to stay true to our ethos of doing what we can with the information we have today. Not what might happen in the future, otherwise we’d need to go back and change the GTX 1080 Ti review to say it’s rubbish compared to current cards. Obviously that’s total nonsense.

We’re also not going to mark things down on predicted price. Price is always something we have expectations of today, from talking to companies and storefronts. But the market is flexible. Stock numbers are volatile. If Nvidia produce a card that’s wildly popular the shelves will be empty. Capitalism means shops with stock will apply the supply and demand rules and put up the price. Those are all concepts and factors WAY outside of our remit. We’re not the Financial Times or Retailers Quarterly.

What’s In the Office?

So in our office are three RTX 5060 Ti cards. One from Zotac that promises to hit shelves at MRSP, and one each from ASUS and MSI who acknowledge they will be priced at a more premium point. Exactly like every other card launch then. In lieu of evidence to the contrary then sitting here, at 6pm on a Tuesday afternoon, we can only review based on how we expect things to be come 2pm on Wednesday.

The RTX 5060 Ti keeps all the newest elements of the wildly popular 5000 series cards. DLSS 4 with a new Transformer model gives us incredible image quality whilst keeping the higher frame rates for which DLSS is known. Additionally DLSS4 has Multi-Frame Generation. More and more of the image being generated from data of a frame that has been.. generated. Yes we don’t understand it either. How is generating a frame on Tensor cores any different to generating it with old-school rasterisation tech? The card is still having to generate each pixel. How is it faster to do it one way but not another? But that’s why we don’t have doctorates from MIT.

What we do know is that DLSS4 and MFG means even these relatively affordable cards can still pump out reasonably playable 4K gaming with ray tracing turned on. Things that just a few years ago were the ravings of seers and not seeming to be on the horizon. But enough of our yap, let’s check out the cards and run some performance tests.

Technical Specifications

A good way of seeing how quickly Nvidia’s technologies have advanced. The 1060 is still incredibly popular if Steam’s hardware survey is to be believed. It’s definitely time to upgrade if you’re one of those people.