Nvidia's latest generation of graphics cards might look familiar on the surface, but dig into the specs and a different story emerges. Earlier this year, we were discussing how the GeForce RTX 5080 is actually closer to an RTX 5070 based on its hardware configuration. Since then, Nvidia has released more graphics cards, and the shrinkflation problem continues.
The underwhelming RTX 5060 is effectively an RTX 5050, we're going to show you the data to back that up – and even then, it is arguably an under-equipped 50-class product.
Granted, Nvidia is free to brand its products however it chooses, but based on the historic record of previous releases, the problem is so obvious that when you adjust the product line-up to more closely reflect the reality of the products you're getting, the GeForce 50 series would become a lot more palatable. Well... palatable at better prices for gamers, not so much for Nvidia.
We'll also examine VRAM stagnation and show just how badly Nvidia has failed PC gamers compared to console gamers over this console generation.
The RTX 5060 is not only more like a "5050" based on core configuration and memory bandwidth, but it also offers far less VRAM than a modern mainstream graphics card should, considering the history of PC GPUs versus console hardware – and we're going to look at 20 years of data to illustrate just that.
Nvidia Core Configurations
Last time we examined Nvidia GPU hardware configurations, we used data going back to 2013's GeForce 700 series to show how each product class compared to the flagship of that era. We then used that data to create a "typical" GPU generation – an average of what we observed over the last six generations.
This showed us how much each product class is typically scaled down compared to the flagship model across a decade of GeForce GPU history. And when you slot in the RTX 50 series and compare it to a typical generation, it doesn't hold up well.
Nvidia GPUs: Shader (CUDA) Core Count
Above is the core configuration that Nvidia has offered over the years: with the 50 series, the RTX 5090 offers 21,760 CUDA cores, which is reduced in successive steps to 10,752 cores for the RTX 5080, 6,144 cores for the RTX 5070, and, as we now know, 3,840 cores for the RTX 5060.
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