A German website takes stock of the performance gap between the 16 GB GeForce RTX 5060 Ti and its smaller 8 GB sibling.
While we await the release of the next GeForce RTX 5060s, which will further lower the price of NVIDIA's Blackwell generation, it's the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti that takes the prize for "affordability". We're putting this term in quotation marks, because at 449 euros for a version with 16 GB of video memory, it's still a definite investment that not all gamers are ready to make. So the question most legitimately arises as to whether it wouldn't be sufficient to opt for the version of the card with "only" 8 GB of memory. It's true, after all, it's equipped with the same GPU, i.e. the same number of cores, and the video memory used by NVIDIA is the same 28 Gbps GDDR7 on the same 128-bit interface bus, for an identical bandwidth of 448 GB/s. However, this 8GB version is officially priced at 399 euros, which represents a considerable saving.
The problem is that, when the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti was released, the press could only get their hands on 16 GB models sent by NVIDIA. The American company didn't send any 8GB versions... shouldn't this have been a sign?
Average differences between the two GeForce RTX 5060 Ti variants © ComputerBase
A few weeks after the release, ComputerBase was the first to clarify the situation. To do so, the Germans purchased two Palit GeForce RTX 5060 Ti cards: a Palit GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Dual (8 GB) and a Palit GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Infinity 3 (16 GB). They then used the same test platform and ran a whole series of games (27 in all) to see how the two RTX 5060 Ti variants performed. They gave priority to 1440p tests and added a small variant by running tests on PCI Express Gen 5 bus, but also on PCI Express Gen 4 bus. Unsurprisingly, the results obviously depend a great deal on the games used, and we can say that on a large half (14 games), the differences are small, even very small. This means, however, that for the remaining 13 games, the differences are more significant.
We invite you to consult the entire ComputerBase dossier, but the graph above provides a summary that we find very interesting. On average, across all 27 games, the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB outperforms its smaller sibling by 14%, with much larger differences in some cases. It's worth noting that the differences are also greater on the 1% low (FPS percentile on the graph), i.e. when the card is already struggling: if the GPU is struggling, it's going to struggle even more with just 8 GB of memory. Last but not least, for a slightly older platform that is the obvious target for GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, a PCI Express Gen 4 interface is a further handicap for the 8 GB version: while the 16 GB offers virtually the same performance in PCIe 5/PCIe 4, the same cannot be said of the card with half the memory. All in all, for a 50-euro difference, it seems far more worthwhile to opt for the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB... so much for saving money.
