Nvidia is reportedly prepping a new budget gaming GPU in a bid to tempt gamers with smaller budgets over to its new Blackwell architecture. According to reports, there’s a new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 coming soon, which would mark a new strategy for the company, as the desktop RTX 4000 range only dropped down as far as the $299 RTX 4060.
Let’s be realistic, the RTX 5050 isn’t going to be the best graphics card you can buy, but Nvidia has had a gaping hole in the sub-$250 market GPU for years now, and this new GPU might just plug that gap. That’s assuming, of course, that Nvidia can make anywhere near enough GPUs to cover demand, and the dire RTX 5070 stock situation doesn’t look promising here.
This latest rumor comes from a story on tech site Wccftech, which cites its own sources – “our information” – as the origin of this knowledge. As such, bear in mind that it absolutely hasn’t been confirmed by Nvidia, and it needs to be taken with a grain of salt for now. According to the site, Nvidia is aiming to take on the Intel Arc B580 with the RTX 5050, leading to speculation that it will be priced somewhere between $199 and $249, although the MSRP may well end up being academic if there isn’t enough supply of the new GPUs.
The site claims the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 will come with 8GB of VRAM, which is better than the laptop RTX 4050, which only had 6GB of memory. Confusingly, the site also states that the RTX 5050 will have a total board power (TBP) of both 145W and 135W, but we suspect this may be down to a typo, and that the 145W figure refers to the RTX 5060, while the 135W figure is for the RTX 5050.
As for when it’s coming out, the site says the rumored Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 release date is April 2025, which isn’t far away at all. The site also says there may be standard and Ti versions of the card, with the two options potentially covering two price points. As I said before, though, this is all based on rumor for now, and the RTX 5050 may not even exist.
While there was a laptop RTX 4050 based on Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture, the company never made an RTX 4050 desktop card, despite there being an RTX 3050 card in the previous generation. I really like the prospect of the big players making gaming GPUs in the $199 price sector again, as PC gaming has become a bit of a rich gamers’ exclusive club lately.
In the meantime, if you’re looking to buy a new GPU now, check out our RTX 5070 review, as well as our 9070 XT review, as the latter is our current favorite graphics card from this generation, assuming you can find 9070 XT stock anywhere.
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