When it comes to budget graphics cards, there are seemingly fewer options today than ever, largely due to the surprisingly extreme prices of the most powerful cards. However, it’s often overlooked that AMD, Intel, and Nvidia have a fairly decent selection of sub-£500 graphics cards, albeit they often come with some limitations in terms of performance and/or hardware, which more often than not comes down to the amount of VRAM the card has. Now, VRAM isn’t the be-all end-all of GPU performance, at least not to the degree some internet comment sections would have you believe. But we certainly understand why it matters to many and the impact it can have, especially in AAA titles.
So, why are we testing the, let’s be honest, less popular 8GB model? Well, largely because they’re out there, a bit more affordable than their 16GB counterparts, and in plentiful supply, making it often quite easy to find them in pre-built systems, or find the cards at a competitive price. I have the INNO3D NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Twin X2 8GB Blackwell Graphics Card on the test bench today, but with one strict rule for our testing, all the games are free to play. Yes, there are in-game purchases, but if you want to download them and just jump straight into the action, they won’t cost you a penny.
RTX 5060 Ti 8GB Five F2P FPS Titles Tested!
I think it’s fair to say that if you’re buying the 8GB card and you were going to drop a chunk of change on a full-priced AAA game, you could just buy the 16GB card and wait for the game to go on sale. Actually, why not check out our review of the INNO3D RTX 5060 Ti 16GB Twin X2 Graphics Card
here! However, if you’re interested in eSports and Free to Play (F2P) titles, and you’re on a tight budget, and you just want to get gaming right now, then that’s what we’re putting to the test today.
We’ll be testing PUBG, Counter-Strike, Apex Legends, Fortnite, and Valorant, which are all some of the most popular games on Steam right now, with a very high active player count on any day of the week, so without a doubt, these are the sorts of games a budget-conscious gamer is going to be getting stuck into. Each game will be tested at 1080p, on an AOC Full-HD gaming monitor capable of high refresh rates. Furthermore, we’ll be testing at five built-in profiles, such as low, medium, high, etc, where appropriate. However, where we’ve made changes to the settings to accommodate our goal of high refresh rates, or where the games don’t have built-in profiles, we’ll make our own and detail them as they become relevant.
- PUBG
- Counter-Strike (CS2)
- Apex Legends
- Fortnite
- Valorant
RTX 5060 8GB Features
- Architecture: NVIDIA Blackwell
- AI: 5th Generation Tensor Cores
- Ray Tracing: 4th Generation Ray Tracing Cores
- Connectivity: PCIe 5.0
- Cooling: Twin X2 dual 88mm scythe blades
- Display Support: Up to 4 monitors, with a maximum resolution of 7680×4320
- VR Ready: Yes
- Power Connector: 1x 8-pin PCIe
Specifications
- CUDA Cores: 3840
- Boost Clock: Up to 2497 MHz
- Memory: 8 GB GDDR7
- Memory Bus: 128-bit
- Memory Bandwidth: 448 GB/sec
- Outputs: 3x DisplayPort 2.1b, 1x HDMI 2.1b
- Board Power: 145 W
- Recommended System Power: 550W
- Dimensions: 225mm (L) x 116mm (H) x 41mm (W)
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