Nvidia did its best to ensure that the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB video card reviews were seen by as few potential buyers as possible. The company did not provide samples for testing, so industry reviewers had to purchase these cards at their own expense – after the release of the video card, which formally took place at the same time as the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB model. Australian YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed was able to purchase one of these video cards and conduct gaming tests.
Image source: Hardware Unboxed
The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB completely replicates the characteristics of the 16GB version. The video card uses a GB206-300 graphics processor with 4608 CUDA cores, 144 texture units, 48 rasterization units, and 36 RT cores. However, it is the half-size amount of available GDDR7 video memory that seriously affects performance compared to the 16GB model.
The difference in minimum FPS (1% low) reaches a whopping 589% in some cases. Where the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB delivers 68 fps, the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB barely manages 16 fps. A prime example is Horizon Forbidden West, running in 4K with DLSS (Performance mode) and very high quality settings. In other games, the situation is better, but not by much, as the performance summary table below shows. The average FPS difference between the cards in various games ranged from 12% to 350%.
According to Hardware Unboxed, the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB was outdated right away due to its limited video memory. In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the 8GB card refused to work: at 1080p and maximum quality settings, the game crashed, probably due to insufficient memory. At the same time, the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB delivered around 95 frames per second under these conditions.
Hardware Unboxed also tested the cards in Space Marine 2, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel Rivals, Spider-Man 2, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor 2, Alan Wake 2, God of War: Ragnarok, and Black Myth: Wukong. In some games, the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB had issues rendering textures due to a lack of memory.
However, even the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB can find its use in eSports disciplines, which, as a rule, have low demands on the graphics subsystem and can work on this card as stably as on the model with 16 GB of memory.
Overall, the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB is capable of delivering acceptable FPS in modern games, but in most cases you’ll have to manually lower the graphics settings and resolution. As Hardware Unboxed notes, since the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti uses a PCIe 5.0 interface with only eight lanes, you should expect an additional performance hit when installing the card in a system with PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 3.0.