Introduction

NVIDIA today launched the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, and we have with us the Palit RTX 5060 Ti Infinity 3 16 GB. The company today introduced both the 8 GB and 16 GB memory variants of the RTX 5060 Ti, with the 8 GB variant starting at $375, and the 16 GB variant at $425. Both variants have identical specs besides the memory sizes. The new Infinity line of graphics cards from Palit are designed to be priced at the NVIDIA baseline pricing, and meet the company’s recent SFF Ready specs that call for custom-design graphics cards to be reasonably small, to fit into some of the tighter mid-tower cases and SFF boxes. Infinity 3 denotes a triple-fan variant of this design, Palit also has a dual-fan version of this card that’s even smaller. The new GeForce RTX 5060 Ti from NVIDIA is perhaps the company’s most important GPU from this generation, as it targets the largest segments of the market—1080p and the aspirational section of it that likes to max out their gameplay, and possibly even upgrade to larger 1440p displays.

Just like the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is technically classified as a 1440p-class GPU but is found to be capable of 4K UHD gaming, letting it occupy a gray-area between the performance- and enthusiast segments; the new RTX 5060 Ti is being offered as a 1080p-class GPU, but we put it in a similar gray-area between the mainstream- and performance segments. The RTX 5060 Ti is designed to max out your games at 1080p, including with ray tracing; although if you know your way around your game’s settings, can get the NVIDIA App to find the right ones, or want to leverage the awesome capabilities of DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, which the RTX 5060 Ti and the Blackwell graphics architecture have to offer, then 1440p becomes a viable use-case. The 16 GB memory should help with lowering the performance cost of ray tracing, too.

The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is powered by the Blackwell graphics architecture, which introduces the concept of Neural Rendering—to leverage the power of generative AI to create in-game visual assets in real time, and blend it with the classic raster 3D just like ray traced objects are. NVIDIA even worked with Microsoft to lay the API-level groundwork for Neural Rendering. What makes this exclusive to the RTX 50-series is the new hardware scheduler NVIDIA introduced, called the AI Management Processor (AMP), which lets the GPU accelerate generative AI models and render graphics in tandem. Microsoft’s API-level standardization with DirectX 12 lets games directly access the Tensor cores on the GPU.

With this generation, NVIDIA is also introducing DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation. DLSS 4 sees NVIDIA replace the convoluted neural networks (CNN) based AI models handling super resolution, ray reconstruction, and frame generation; with newer Transformer-based models, which are more accurate, and offer image quality improvements at all performance tiers. Multi Frame Generation is a step up from DLSS 3 Frame Generation introduced with the RTX 40-series; which sees the GPU generate up to 3 frames entirely using AI, for every conventionally-rendered frame. This effectively quadruples frame-rates, but when used in conjunction with super resolution, it could mean 1 conventionally rendered pixel resulting in up to 15 pixels drawn entirely by AI. Multi Frame Generation relies on hardware flip-metering, which is exclusive to Blackwell GPUs.

The new Blackwell generation CUDA core not just introduce generational IPC increases, but are also redesigned to accelerate neural shaders. The 4th generation RT core, besides continuing to lower the performance cost of ray tracing compared to the previous generation, comes with optimization for mega geometry—ray traced objects with much more complex geometry (more surfaces for rays to interact with). The 5th generation Tensor cores lay the groundwork for not just for neural rendering, but also introduce support for newer data formats, including FP4. Updates are also introduced to the display engine, which supports DisplayPort 2.1 with UHBR20, and HDMI 2.1. The latest generation video encode and decode accelerators support 4:2:2 color formats, and AV1 B-frames, which vastly reduce video stream bitrates and file sizes.

The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti introduces the new GB206 silicon, NVIDIA’s fourth new silicon from this generation. This chip, like the rest of the Blackwell family, is built on the same exact NVIDIA 4N foundry node as the RTX 40-series Ada generation, and so all efficiency improvements you see are purely a function of the architecture. The RTX 5060 Ti maxes out the GB206 silicon on which it is based. This chip comes with 36 streaming multiprocessors (SM), which work out to 4,608 CUDA cores, 144 Tensor cores, 36 RT cores, 144 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. The chip also features 32 MB of L2 cache, which the RTX 5060 Ti maxes out. The memory interface is 128-bit wide GDDR7. This upgrade has the greatest impact on memory bandwidth compared to the previous generation RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB. With a memory speed of 28 Gbps (GDDR7-effective), the RTX 5060 Ti enjoys 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth, a massive 55% increase over the 18 Gbps GDDR6 that the RTX 4060 Ti used. The RTX 5060 Ti comes with an updated PCI-Express 5.0 x8 host interface. On all platforms since 2021—Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake and Ryzen 7000 Zen 4, this means comparable host interface bandwidth to PCI-Express 4.0 x16.

The Palit RTX 5060 Ti Infinity 3 16 GB is very close to what would have been an NVIDIA reference design. It is priced at NVIDIA’s baseline price, has reference clock speeds, meets SFF Ready product dimensions, and is one of only two cards we’re reviewing today that comes with a classic 8-pin PCIe power connector. Given the 180 W TGP of the RTX 5060 Ti, a single 8-pin PCIe (150 W) with PCIe slot power (75 W), meet the power budget of the GPU. If you recall, the RTX 4070 had similar power specs. Most other custom design RTX 5060 Ti cards we’re reviewing today implement a newer 16-pin 12V2x6 power connector, with an included adapter. Palit is pricing this card at $430.