Nvidia’s Cheapest Graphics Card, the GeForce RTX 5060, Lands May 19

After introducing the RTX 5060 last month, Nvidia has finally revealed its launch date: May 19.

Expect sales to begin at 9 a.m. EST, right after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gives his keynote at the Computex trade show in Taipei. The GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop GPU launches on the same day, according to an Nvidia blog post published on Tuesday. 

The GeForce RTX 5060 stands out for its $299 starting price, making it the most affordable graphics card in Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series. “With GeForce RTX 5060, you can play your favorite games at 100+ FPS,” the company says.

That said, the product’s gaming uplift relies heavily on activating Nvidia’s DLSS 4 frame-generation tool. Otherwise, as the company’s own benchmarks show, you can expect only a minor upgrade in frame rates.  

(Credit: Nvidia)

Still, Nvidia sees an opportunity to sell the card to gamers looking to upgrade from the older RTX 2060 and GTX 1660, which the company initially released in 2019 and remain in use among many Steam players.

In terms of specs, the RTX 5060 features 3,804 CUDA cores, down from 4,608 cores in the RTX 5060 Ti, which launched last month starting at $429 for the 16GB model and $379 for the 8GB variant. Like the 5060 Ti, the 5060’s main limitation appears to be the 8GB of GDDR7 memory, which uses a 128-bit bus.

(Credit: Nvidia)

The 128-bit memory interface risks hampering performance on 4K resolutions, as our own review of the RTX 5060 Ti found. So the RTX 5060 is probably best used for 1080p or 1440p gaming. The other issue is that although Nvidia says the product’s starting price will be $299, third-party GPU vendors may sell it for more, especially due to Trump’s 20% tariff on Chinese assembled products. Stay tuned for our review.