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Can the Nvidia RTX 5050 Realistically Play Ray Tracing Games?

By / Tech / July 1, 2025

The RTX 5050 is Nvidia’s latest budget GPU. It is marketed as a ray tracing cable GPU, but can it actually play games with ray tracing?

Picture of the Zotac GeForce RTX 5050 Twin Edge
The Zotac GeForce RTX 5050 Twin Edge

The RTX 5050 is the cheapest Nvidia RTX 50 series GPU, so it comes with lower specifications. After all, it is priced at $249, which is relatively affordable considering inflation and other rising costs. The Nvidia RTX 5050 is launching later in July 2025 as the successor to the RTX 3050.

Since the RTX 5050 carries the RTX branding, people logically expect it to be capable of playing ray tracing games. However, can it actually run ray tracing games, considering it is such a low-end GPU? That’s exactly what we plan to explore in this article. Read on to find out more.

Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the writer’s opinions.

Does Nvidia RTX 5050 Have Ray Tracing Capability?

The Nvidia RTX 5050 has actual ray tracing cores, so yes, it does have ray tracing capability. Nvidia equipped it with 4th Gen ray tracing cores, but the RT core count is only 20, which certainly raises some concerns. For full clarity, here are all the specs of the RTX 5050:

SpecificationsDetails
ArchitectureBlackwell
Shader cores2560
RT cores20
TMUs80
ROPs32
Base core clock speeds2317 MHz
Boost core clock speeds2572 MHz
Memory capacity8GB GDDR6
Memory bus width128-bit
Memory bandwidth320 GB/s
Manufacturing node5nm
Thermal design power (TDPs)130W

Can the RTX 5050 Actually Play Ray Tracing Games?

The RTX 5050 should be able to play some ray tracing games just fine. Its predecessor, the RTX 3050, demonstrated that it could play a few RTX titles—usually only at around 30 FPS. Since the RTX 5050 is much newer and is built on a better architecture, it should be able to run them with improved quality and/or performance, especially at 1080p with DLSS enabled.

Less demanding ray tracing games such as Far Cry 6, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition, and Control should reach close to 60 FPS at 1080p on this GPU, particularly with DLSS turned on. However, more demanding ray tracing titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora may only run at around 30 FPS, even with DLSS enabled. This is expected for a low-end graphics card like the RTX 5050.

Gaming at 30 FPS isn’t as bad as some users make it out to be. You’ll realize this when you actually start playing the games and see the gorgeous ray-traced visuals. Besides, if you disable ray tracing, titles shouldn’t have any issue reaching 60 FPS or higher. Essentially, you will be able to play at 30 FPS or more for ray tracing games and 60 FPS or more for normal rasterized titles.

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