ASUS GeForce RTX 5060 Ti TUF OC 16 GB Review

Introduction

ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5060 Ti OC 16 GB is the company’s premium custom-design rendition of NVIDIA’s new performance segment GPU making its debut today. The card sports the latest generation of TUF Gaming board design by ASUS, particularly its Vented Exoskeleton architecture that relies on a heavy aluminium fin-stack heatsink, with a cooler shroud that exposes most of this heatsink externally, for better ventilation. The card also offers the company’s latest Axial-Tech fans with double ball bearings. Other premium touches include a modern 16-pin 12V-2×6 power connector, and dual-BIOS.

The new GeForce RTX 5060 Ti comes in two memory variants, both of which are launching today. In this review, we take a close look at a 16 GB card. Both memory variants otherwise come with identical specs. The RTX 5060 Ti is recommended by NVIDIA for maxed out gameplay at 1080p, including with ray tracing, although we believe the RTX 5060 Ti occupies a gray area between what constitutes mid-range, and performance segment; and although this is marketed as a 1080p-class GPU, it should still be capable of 1440p, with fairly high settings and ray tracing. You just need to know your way around your game’s settings, or let the NVIDIA App pick the best settings for you. Better yet, unlock the awesome capabilities of DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation to transform your playability.

The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is the fifth GPU from the RTX 50-series Blackwell generation. The new Blackwell graphics architecture introduces Neural Rendering—the ability for the GPU to run generative AI models that create in-game assets in real time, and combine them with raster 3D graphics. This is made possible with a new hardware scheduler on the silicon, called the AI Management Processor (AMP). The API-level groundwork for Neural Rendering has been laid by NVIDIA and Microsoft, letting 3D apps directly address the Tensor cores on the GPU.

The GeForce Blackwell generation also introduces DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation. DLSS 4 introduces updated Transformer-based AI models replacing the older CNN-based ones, which improve image quality for super resolution, at every performance preset. These Transformer models also power ray reconstruction and frame generation. Multi Frame Generation is the ability for the GPU to generate up to three frames following a conventionally rendered frame completely using AI, effectively quadrupling frame rates. This should come in handy with high refresh-rate displays where a playable frame rate above 40 FPS is transformed into something in excess of 100 FPS, to keep pace with the refresh rate of the display. Multi Frame Generation is exclusive to Blackwell as it relies on hardware flip-metering, a component that’s part of Blackwell’s display engine.

The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti introduces the new GB206 silicon, NVIDIA’s fourth new gaming GPU based on this architecture. The RTX 5060 Ti maxes out the GB206, enabling all 36 SM (streaming multiprocessors) present on the silicon, which works out to 4,608 CUDA cores, 144 Tensor cores, 36 RT cores, and 144 TMUs. The silicon comes with 48 ROPs, and 32 MB of L2 cache. The memory interface for both the 8 GB and 16 GB variants is 128-bit wide, but this is the updated GDDR7 memory type. For the RTX 5060 Ti, which uses 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory chips, this means a much-needed 55% increase in memory bandwidth over the previous RTX 4060 Ti that uses 18 Gbps GDDR6.

The ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 5060 Ti OC 16 GB offers factory overclocked speeds of 2662 MHz over the 2572 MHz reference speeds, with its default P-BIOS (OC BIOS). The Q-BIOS (quiet BIOS) scales down clock speeds to favor a tighter fan curve that keeps noise levels down when gaming. ASUS is among many partner cards we’re reviewing today to implement a 16-pin 12V-2×6 power connector. The RTX 5060 Ti comes with a TGP of 180 W, which should normally work just fine with a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, as was the case with the RTX 4070. ASUS includes an adapter that converts two 8-pin to a 16-pin, which means the card is able to meet all its power budget from the power connector. ASUS is pricing the TUF Gaming RTX 5060 Ti OC 16 GB at $600, a massive step up from the $425 MSRP.