Whatever you do, don't buy the RTX 5060 yet

Don’t buy the RTX 5060 yet. Nvidia’s latest GPU, which almost seems destined to become the most popular option among its Blackwell options, launches today, a fact that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang graciously referenced during his Computex keynote. The problem is that there aren’t any RTX 5060 reviews today, or at least, there aren't very many.

As early murmurs suggested, Nvidia didn’t hold a review program nor send out drivers to reviewers ahead of time, even if they had cards in hand from Nvidia’s board partners. Short of a select few outlets who published a tailored preview of Nvidia's GPU, no media had access to a driver ahead of release. I have an RTX 5060 available, but I’ll be seeing how it performs alongside the brave early adopters who decide to buy it on release day. And that’s a big problem.

The RTX 5060 deserves a proper assessment

It's not just another GPU

Nvidia doesn’t always roll out the red carpet for its GPU releases. Cards like the RTX 3080 12GB and the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB usually don’t see broad coverage. Nvidia doesn’t coordinate with reviewers for these niche options, and buyers generally learn about them after they’ve been released and reviewers have had a chance to buy or acquire a card in some other way.

There may be some malicious intent in sidelining these GPUs, but it doesn’t matter too much. The cards Nvidia silently releases onto the market are usually variations of other GPUs, and almost always have a niche audience. The RTX 5060 is anything but that.

Nvidia’s 60-class offerings are consistently its most popular options, and by sidelining the RTX 5060, Nvidia’s actions suggest the RTX 5060 doesn’t matter. Its words say the exact opposite. This is probably the most important GPU Nvidia has released this generation, but despite that, we saw broader coverage for the 16GB RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5070, the former of which will almost certainly be less popular than the RTX 5060.

I’m not saying Nvidia is trying to hide the performance of the RTX 5060 or mislead buyers. That might be true, but the reasons aren’t what matter. The impact is what matters. Instead of broad coverage where buyers can make an informed decision about whether they should buy the RTX 5060, they'll just need to take Nvidia’s word for it. That’s even more true considering how difficult it is to get a GPU at list price right now, pushing buyers to make an impulsive purchase even if the RTX 5060 ends up being a bad option.

DLSS benchmarks don’t matter when you control the narrative

Nvidia's handing buyers a blank piece of paper

Although Nvidia announced the release date of the RTX 5060 prior to Computex, it provided some glimpses into the performance of the card at the annual event. You can see the figures above, which, unsurprisingly, show the performance of the RTX 5060 with DLSS 4, including Nvidia’s Multi-Frame Generation (MFG).

This slide might as well not even exist. DLSS and other upscaling and frame generation technologies are a cornerstone of modern gaming PCs, no doubt, but they don’t take the place of benchmarks without these technologies enabled. If the RTX 5060 is only a touch faster than the RTX 4060, it’s important for buyers to understand that they aren’t buying much extra GPU power. They’re buying MFG.

Even without casting a value judgement on features like DLSS and MFG, strictly controlling the performance narrative in the way Nvidia has here does a disservice to buyers. It skews the story in order to obfuscate the important details buyers need in order to decide if the RTX 5060 is right for them. Nvidia tells me the RTX 5060 is “about” 20% faster than the RTX 4060 without DLSS enabled, but it’s hard to trust that given how Nvidia is going about this launch.

The value of launch day GPU reviews

It's about more than early access

Nvidia has characterized its withholding of press drivers as some sort of democratization of this launch. Everyone gets the same driver at the same time; those media elites don’t have early access just because they lucked into reviewing PC hardware. Those aren’t Nvidia’s words (not even close), but that’s at least the impression I was left with after learning more about the RTX 5060.

So, I think it’s important to address the value of launch day GPU reviews outside answering obvious questions about whether you should buy the RTX 5060 or not.

PC hardware is complex, and increasingly, rife with issues that don’t show up in a bar chart. CPUs and power connectors burn themselves up, drivers show a ton of bugs, and performance on launch day doesn’t always match performance a few months down the line. Broad launch day coverage helps catch and surface as many of these issues as possible.

One odd benchmark result, crashes in a particular game, or driver issues are something you hear about constantly in reviews, and they help narrow the focus of what a product gets right, and where it falls short. Even if we don’t know the full scope of an issue on release day, reviews can help push the wider PC hardware community in the right direction, and hopefully get closer to an understanding as fast as possible.

You have dozens upon dozens of reviewers using different tests with different PC configurations, and that scope brings otherwise dormant problems to the surface. It’s not about a select few people getting to play with the hardware before everyone else. It’s about cutting through the willful half-truths presented in marketing materials to fully understand what it means for a buyer to spend their hard-earned money on a product.

You do you, but be careful

Given the handful of early previews, and one publications willingness to share how restricted these previews were, there are at least some RTX 5060 reviews. The vast majority of them won't come for another week or two, though, and if you're planning on picking up the RTX 5060 today, it's important to understand the situation. As for me, I'll be head-down testing the RTX 5060 when I return from Computex, and I'll wear the lack of a curated preview as a badge of honor.