Nvidia Swears You’ll Be Able to Buy an RTX 5060 at $300, but Good Luck Finding One

Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs launch has been fraught, to say the least. Even beyond performance and drivers issues, the most enduring issue is it’s too damn hard to buy any of these GPUs for their base price. After launching all its top-end and mid-range GPUs, Nvidia pinky swears that with the $300 Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, this time will be different. The GPU is launching today, May 19, but it lacks any pre-release drivers that would help reviewers determine if it’s worth beating the scalpers to buy it first.

The RTX 5060 is the card based on the Blackwell microarchitecture that Nvidia said is made for 1080p gaming first and foremost. While Nvidia announced the cards would hit the scene today, it finally released its drivers at 12 p.m. ET. The card should start populating at online retailers in the afternoon. The company told Gizmodo that it was continuing to work with AIC (add-in card) manufacturers to list prices at or close to the initial $300 asking price. Nvidia’s director of public relations, Ben Berraondo, also claimed there would be MSRP models available at launch. Nvidia has been leveraging its role as the most prolific supplier of AI training chips to give it a better market position to try and keep its own card costs down, but that won’t necessarily save the GPU makers who plan to sell you a new RTX 5060.

We’ve heard Nvidia’s optimistic proclamations about supply and price before. The company launched the $450 RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB of VRAM last month, but even then it was incredibly hard to find a card at the lowest possible price. Currently, Nvidia lists the Gigabyte WindForce version of the 16GB RTX 5060 Ti for $480 on its website as one of the few buying options close to MSRP. Elsewhere, you can find overclocked and stock cards going for $100 or upwards of $150 above the base asking price, including both the 8GB and 16GB versions.

The RTX 5060 Ti stock fared far better than the RTX 5070, 5080, or 5090 did at launch, but the 5060 is already a strange beast, and we don’t know how long it can stay off the endangered species list. Nvidia did not provide reviewers access to the cards’ drivers prior to the launch on May 19. That means nobody can accurately say how well the cards perform compared to the RTX 4060 family. We suggest waiting for any semblance of reviews before you hit the buy button. This is the first 50-series release that didn’t offer pre-release drivers for reviewers, and we hope it’s not indicative of the performance one can expect from these entry-level GPUs.

As of writing, those drivers have yet to materialize. Nvidia instead promised users could see massive performance increases compared to the RTX 4060, but that’s when factoring in Nvidia’s DLSS 4 upscaling and multi-frame gen—the special tech that inserts AI-generated frames between rendered frames to increase frames per second. Non-enhanced performance gains from generation to generation could be around 20%, but few outside Nvidia have been able to test that for themselves. Most of the largest online retailers in the U.S. have yet to reveal their stock of cards, but Best Buy listings offer a taste of what’s in store. There are a few bare RTX 5060 cards from Asus and an overclocked PNY card. We’ll have to wait and see how fast the cheap cards go compared to the more expensive versions.

There are a few other reasons to hold off buying Nvidia’s low-level GPUs. Multiple leaks and rumors suggest AMD will reveal its Radeon RX 9060 XT cards this week. Two leaked listings from two separate AICs suggest consumers will have options to buy one with 8GB or 16GB of VRAM. Of course, just like the RTX 5060 Ti, you really want the one with more memory for the sake of gaming at higher resolutions up to 1440p. There is still little to go on regarding timing and price. The $600 Radeon RX 9070 XT was such a hot-ticket item for its lower price compared to its stellar 4K performance. Considering ongoing tariff woes jacking up prices, we’d be lucky if the company can do the same for its lower-level GPUs.