PNY GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB

Written by John Yan on 4/18/2025 for PC  

It’s been a month or so since the last NVIDIA card. But a few days ago they announced the GeForce RTX 5060 and GeForce RTX 5060 Ti cards aimed at the lower middle tier segment. Unlike the Ada Lovelace generation, NVIDIA is not producing any Founder’s Edition card for these two and are leaving it up to the AIBs on this one.

NVIDIA was kind enough to send along the PNY version of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB variant to review and it’s important to note that we got the 16GB version. The RTX 5060 Ti will come in both an 8GB and a 16GB version with a $50 difference with the 16GB version coming in at $429. This, when compared to the RTX 4060 Ti 16Gb version, is $70 less than the launch price back in July of 2023.

The question, though, is can you find this card at the MSRP? With the way tariffs are these days, along with the uncertainty of other factors: it will, in fact, be tough to find this card at MSRP. That said, I would highly recommend not purchasing the 8GB version unless you’re just going to play competitive games at low settings. Even so, I’d wait on the RTX 5060, which will be $299 and released in May if you’re only going to be gaming in that type of situation.

Spec wise, the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti contains 4608 CUDA cores running at a 2407 MHz clock with a boost clock at 2572 MHz. As mentioned earlier, we have 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM giving you some headroom for modern and future titles that are more VRAM intensive. Below is a chart comparing it with the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti.

	GeForce RTX 5060 Ti	GeForce RTX 4060 Ti
SM	36	34
CUDA Cores	4608	4352
Tensor Cores	144	136
RT Cores	36	34
Texture Units	144	136
ROPs	48	48
Base Clock	2407 MHz	2310 MHz
Boost Clock	2572 MHz	2535 MHz

For those that do not like the 12VHPWR connector: good news, as the PNY card features one 8-pin power connector. That makes sense since this card’s max TGP is 180W. What doesn’t make sense on the PNY version is the location of the connector. It’s near the front of the card, which makes it challenging in some scenarios to get the cable there. Yes, the card’s PCB is half the length of the entire cooler, but I think the 8-pin power connector should have been moved more towards the back of the card.

The PNY version of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is a dual slot card that comes in at 9.5” in length making it a relatively shorter card. It has two fans blowing into a standard heat sink configuration. With the PCB being really short, the size makes the RTX 5060 Ti one that would work well in smaller cases. It also weighs a lot lighter when compared to the RTX 4060 Ti Founder’s Edition.

I/O on the card is your typical standard Blackwell card consisting of three DisplayPort 2.1b connectors and one HDMI 2.1b connector. That means you can connect up to four displays to the card if you so desire.

For the review, I’m running all my tests at 1440P, and in some games, I’ve changed the settings down to medium. We’re going to do something a little different and break this review up by games rather than rasterization and DLSS performance. My test system consists of:

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6000 PC5-48000 CL30
ASRock B65-E PG Riptide WiFi motherboard
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090
Samsung 990 Pro 4TB SSD
LG OLED42C2PUA 42"
NVIDIA Drivers 575.94

Let's start with our first game, Baldur's Gate 3. The test consisted of running through a part of the city in Act 3.

Interestingly, there's a nice 35.6% increase on the average FPS and a healthy 72.9% increase in 1% lows. That means the 5060 Ti does a much better job at providing a smooth performance in the harder to render areas. Now, Baldur's Gate 3 isn't a quick-paced action game, so having some slower parts ain't bad. Let's move onto Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Here we didn't see as much of a performance increase in terms of average over the RTX 4060 Ti, but the 1% lows were a lot better. And it showed in the benchmark as with the RTX 4060 Ti, even at lower some settings like textures, it was a stuttery mess. It could be because of the 8GB VRAM limitation on the RTX 4060 Ti card we have.

The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti showed no such issues and was buttery smooth throughout the benchmark. While the 13% increase in FPS is OK, it's the much larger improvement in 1% lows that make the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti card a much better performer. Turning on DLSS yields some nice gains, but switching between Quality and Balanced doesn't offer nearly as much uplift as just going from no DLSS to some form of DLSS upscaling.

Cyberpunk 2077 is another title where you can see some nice uplift when compared to the previous generation. I also chalk this up to the 8GB of extra VRAM as well. Like Black Ops 6, the benchmark had stuttering issues and you can forget about enabling RTX in high settings. With the RTX 5060 Ti, I got a healthy 34.1% increase in rasterization performance while 1% lows did 67.9% better on the Blackwell card. When you turn on Psycho RTX, the RTX 5060 Ti gets to be a little bit playable, but DLSS helps with making it be more consistent, and in an acceptable performance range.

Because the RTX 5060 Ti is a Blackwell card, you get access to multi-frame generation of up to 4X, which can really help smooth things out. As you can see, turning on 2X can offer up a very smooth performance, while 4X does even better—although I did see a little bit more visual artifacts in this mode. Unless you are already getting a good framerate without frame generation enabled, I'd stick with 2X which offers more than enough FPS gains to offer up a nice gaming experience in the title.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has ray tracing by default, which Blackwell cards are suitable to handle. As with the other titles, the lack of VRAM in my RTX 4060 Ti model really made performance inconsistent. While the averages were good, the 1% lows really showed how much the card struggles in this title. Even turning on DLSS on the RTX 4060 Ti produced a choppy experience, and this is with the game at low settings. The RTX 5060 Ti had no problems during the Jungle scene and provided a much smoother gameplay experience when it comes to a title that requires ray tracing. Turning on high path tracing, the RTX 5060 Ti had a base of 25.52 FPS average, but DLSS and frame generation really helps push the title to a very nice playable speed. When I tried turning on path tracing on the RTX 4060 Ti, the game would just crash. No problems though with the RTX 5060 Ti.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a more CPU-bound title, but we do see how the two cards perform with the graphics set at medium. While there's a slight uplift in rasterization, the two cards performed just about the same when you enable DLSS in both Quality and Balanced modes. In fact, the RTX 4060 Ti did outperform the RTX 5060 Ti slightly with Balanced DLSS enabled. It's close to being in the range of acceptable run to run variance, but the multiple times I ran my flight test, the RTX 4060 Ti came out ahead.

Now turning on frame generation saw the RTX 5060 Ti push past the RTX 4060 Ti and I just ran it on Quality DLSS, since Balanced DLSS performances were similar. For a title like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, I would always suggest using frame generation since it's a slower-paced title and the smoothness with frame generation really shines in a title like this.

One title I did omit from this review is Star Wars Outlaws. There were a lot of stability issues when trying to run benchmarks and the RTX 4060 Ti was around 50% faster in certain tests. I kept changing the cards and testing to see, but the results were really inconsistent. A lot of times, the game would fall down into the single digit in performance without me doing anything other than turning on a single feature. Hopefully, some driver updates can fix this issue, or if it is the game's fault, a patch can come out to alleviate the problem. If the title was stable, I would have included it here as it was interesting to see the RTX 4060 Ti really coming out ahead in this one. Unfortunately, I couldn't get multiple runs in without facing some issue that would crash the game or make it unplayable.

So, the elephant in the room is how much this card will cost over MSRP after all the tariffs are accounted for in the final pricing. If this card is launched at $429, I could easily recommend it at that price point. We know that's not going to be the case, or it's going to be super rare to find one at that price. I like the size of the card and that it uses an 8-pin power connected, even though it's placed in an awkward position. Overall, I thought the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti was a good card for the lower middle tier setup and those who want to game at 1440P or lower. It's just unfortunate that in the current climate we have now, finding one at that price will be incredibly difficult.