Introduction

MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Gaming Trio 16 GB is the company’s most premium custom design graphics card based on NVIDIA’s new performance-segment GPU coming in today. MSI’s coveted Gaming brand of graphics card transformed the company as the most sought-after custom graphics card designers. The company is launching two board variants of the RTX 5060 Ti Gaming. The Gaming Trio being reviewed here, comes with a slimmer 2-slot cooling solution that’s longer, and comes with a triple-fan setup. We are also separately reviewing the MSI RTX 5060 Ti Gaming, which comes with a much shorter cooling solution that has just two fans, but which is 3 slots-thick, and meets NVIDIA’s SFF Ready dimensions. The new GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is positioned in the upper reaches of NVIDIA’s mid-range for the RTX 50-series, and sits in the gray area between mid-range and performance segment. It is recommended by NVIDIA for 1080p maxed out gameplay with ray tracing enabled, but is fairly capable of 1440p with reasonably high settings and ray tracing, especially with the 16 GB memory variant. The company is also launching a more affordable 8 GB variant today.

The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is powered by the Blackwell graphics architecture, which introduces Neural Rendering, or the ability of the GPU to leverage a generative AI model to create richly detailed game assets in real time and combine it with the rest of the conventionally rendered game, much in the same way as it combines ray traced objects. NVIDIA worked with Microsoft to lay the API-level groundwork for Neural Rendering with DirectX 12, so 3D applications can directly address the Tensor cores on the GPU. A new hardware scheduler called the AI Management Process (AMP) is needed to ensure the GPU is able to both accelerate generative AI models and render game graphics in tandem.

NVIDIA is also introducing DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation with Blackwell. DLSS 4 replaces the older convoluted neural networks (CNN) based AI models driving its various components, with newer Transformer-based models, which are more accurate, and improve image quality at every performance preset. These models drive super resolution, ray reconstruction, and frame generation; and depending on the hardware capabilities, even the older RTX 40-series Ada and RTX 30-series Ampere GPUs have access to DLSS 4 features. What’s exclusive to Blackwell, though, is Multi Frame Generation, or the ability of the GPU to create up to 3 frames using AI following every conventionally rendered frame, effectively quadrupling framerates. While MFG isn’t recommended to turn unplayable 15 FPS to 60 FPS, it’s more in its element to turn something like 40 FPS to 120 FPS, benefiting those with high refresh-rate displays. MFG requires hardware flip-metering, which is exclusive to Blackwell.

The Blackwell architecture sees updates to all key components of the GPU. The new Blackwell CUDA core comes with concurrent FP32+INT32 capability for all CUDA cores in an SM. In the older Ada architecture, only half the cores in an SM were capable of this, the other half could only do FP32. The new Tensor core supports FP4 data formats for even greater throughput by trading in precision. The new RT core comes with increases to ray intersection performance, and the hardware-level groundwork for Mega Geometry, or the ability for ray traced objects to have significantly higher poly counts (and the need for rays to bounce off them). The new display engine comes with hardware flip-metering needed for MFG, and an updated display I/O, including DisplayPort 2.1 with UHBR20. The latest NVENC and NVDEC accelerators come with support for 4:2:2 color formats, and AV1 B-frames, to significantly lower bitrates.

The RTX 5060 Ti maxes out the new GB206 silicon it is based on. This tiny chip comes with 36 SM, all of which are enabled on the RTX 5060 Ti. This works out to 4,608 CUDA cores, 144 Tensor cores, 36 RT cores, 144 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. The GPU still relies on a 128-bit wide memory bus on both the 8 GB and 16 GB memory variants, but this uses the latest GDDR7 memory, and both SKUs use 28 Gbps GDDR7 chips, resulting in a cool 55% increase in memory bandwidth over the previous RTX 4060 Ti and its 18 Gbps GDDR6. The host interface is PCI-Express 5.0 x8, which offers comparable bandwidth to PCI-Express 4.0 x16.

The MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Gaming Trio 16 GB comes with the latest generation of Tri-Frozr cooling solution from MSI. The card is designed to look like it’s from a segment above when installed in your PC. There’s plenty of RGB LED lighting, and premium build quality. The Gaming Trio comes with a slender but elongated aluminium fin-stack heatsink that’s ventilated by three axial airflow fans. The card offers factory overclocked speeds of 2647 MHz compared to 2572 MHz reference. MSI is pricing the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Gaming Trio OC 16 GB at $550, which is a significant 29% premium over the NVIDIA baseline price of $429, pushing it close to the MSRP of the RTX 5070.