Nvidia‘s long-awaited budget (or perhaps I should say ‘budget’) RTX 5000 GPUs are finally here, with a last-minute announcement that the RTX 5060 Ti will be dropping on April 16 – yes, that’s tomorrow.
The pricing is naturally what most people have been waiting to see, and I can confirm that the RTX 5060 Ti will start at a very reasonable $379 / £349 (around AU$595) – although that’s for the 8GB model, with the 16GB model setting you back $429 / £399 (around AU$675) at MSRP.
The good news is that’s a generational price cut against the RTX 4060 Ti, for both models. Even better, an RTX 5060 (non-Ti) is coming sometime in May, with a $299 price point (other regional prices to be confirmed), and RTX 5060-series laptops will also start dropping in May.
The bad news is that availability is likely to be rough, if the recent carnage in the GPU market is anything to go off. Between ludicrous price inflation, horrendously low stock levels, tariff-related nonsense, and missing ROPs on some cards, it’s been a perfect storm that has been borderline disastrous for the other RTX 5000 launches, and there’s nothing to indicate this one will be any better.
Graphic violence
Hell, you know what? I might go so far as to say that I expect availability to be even worse this time around. Announcing the card via a blog post 24 hours before the launch is practically approaching a stealth drop, and while I don’t exactly expect the same fanfare we saw for the RTX 5090, this feels almost like Nvidia has kicked it out the door like a problem child on its 18th birthday.
I noted recently that renowned hardware leaker Moore’s Law Is Dead (MLID) on YouTube reported on a source claiming that the RTX 5060 Ti launch would be among the worst seen in recent memory. Basically, you’re going to struggle to get your hands on one of these cards.
On the bright side, this launch is (availability aside) bringing the boosted performance of Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU architecture and DLSS 4 support to PC gamers with smaller budgets, something that has become desperately needed; after all, it’s no secret that many recent triple-A PC releases have struggled performance-wise without modern resolution upscaling solutions like DLSS and the increasingly divisive frame-gen.
There’s one more stumbling block for Nvidia’s newest GPU to overcome, too: the potential for a ‘motherboard tax’ caused by the upgrade to PCIe 5.0. This is an issue that could sting budget buyers more than anyone who can drop multiple thousands on a high-end card. Personally? I think I’ll be keeping an eye on AMD’s RX 9060 XT instead…
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christian.guyton@futurenet.com (Christian Guyton)
