The release of the GeForce RTX 5060 is now a reality, and very few tests have been published on the Internet. The explanation is as simple as it is regrettable.
Earlier this month, NVIDIA confirmed what it had announced at the time of the release of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, by making things a little more precise: the latest addition to the Blackwell range - the GeForce RTX 5060 - will indeed be launched in May, on May 19 to be exact... that is, today. Alas, if you're a hardware fan, you may have noticed that very few sites have been able to publish a real test on this card. In fact, there are roughly only five of them, and they're not even sites particularly well known for their hardware sections: they are the Japanese ASCII, the British GamesRadar, the German GameStar, the French JV and the American Tom's Guide.
The preview published by Japanese site ASCII shows a GeForce RTX 5060 well ahead of the RTX 4060 © ASCII
Why so few sites, and why not world-renowned hardware specialists such as Igor's Lab or Gamer's Nexus? The reason is simple, but as we said in the title of this news item, it also risks setting a dangerous precedent. Indeed, when a new card is launched, Internet sites generally receive a sample to test the beast, but the GPU designer must also send a new version of the graphics drivers capable of recognizing/exploiting the card. This is precisely where the problem arose for the GeForce RTX 5060. NVIDIA only sent these drivers to the five sites mentioned above. Sites which, in exchange, agreed to publish "previews" the day before the card's release. They actually had the decency not to talk about testing, even though the conditions for publishing such papers were quite strict, as GameStar explained: " What's particularly crucial is that we weren't able to freely choose which cards and games we were going to use for this preview, nor with which settings ".
We wouldn't go so far as to say that the five sites in question published complacent previews, but the very fact that the games selected were dictated by NVIDIA poses a serious ethical problem. What's more, the publication of only five tests - published following a deal with NVIDIA - obviously undermines the plurality of the press. NVIDIA will be happy to say that other sites are free to publish " as soon as possible ", but this kind of technique is worrying, and we obviously hope that it doesn't happen again. There's no point in kidding ourselves.
