An entry-level graphics card that should delight PC gamers who don't want to break the bank on their machines.
Last May, NVIDIA launched what it described as the "latest additions" to the Blackwell generation. These GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti enabled Jensen Huang's company to lower the entry ticket to its new architecture, but it was still very expensive, with products priced at over 300 euros. That's the whole point of NVIDIA's latest announcement. Although rumours were increasingly circulating about the arrival of a card geared even more towards the entry-level market, we weren't sure whether NVIDIA would really go for it. After all, there's never been a GeForce RTX 4050, for example.
All GeForce RTX 5050 specifications © NVIDIA
However, from the second half of July onwards, we'll be able to buy a GeForce RTX 4050, which follows on from the RTX 3050. The idea here is not to offer the best to gamers, and the most refined technologies such as path tracing will probably not be usable on a card that NVIDIA nonetheless claims to be 60% faster than the former GeForce RTX 3050. But NVIDIA is careful to specify " in rasterization ". The fact remains that, thanks to Blackwell, the GeForce RTX 4050 will be able to take advantage of DLSS4 and ray tracing, as well as the entire ecosystem set up by NVIDIA for gamers and content creators alike.
The GeForce RTX 4050 will be powered by the GB207-300 GPU, with 2,560 CUDA cores. It is clocked at 2.31 GHz as standard, and can be boosted up to 2.57 GHz. Compared with the other GeForce RTX 50 series, NVIDIA has decided to go for less high-end RAM, GDDR6. This is more than sufficient for this type of card, and will help keep costs down: the GPU is to be equipped with 8 GB of GDDR6 at 20 Gbps, with a 128-bit interface bus for a bandwidth of 320 GB/s. Given the small size of the card, power consumption should be kept to a minimum, and NVIDIA quotes a TGP of 130 watts, even if it recommends a 550-watt power supply, which seems a little over-rated.
All that's left is to find out the exact release date of this card, which for the moment benefits from a somewhat vague window, " the second half of July ". What's more, while NVIDIA has announced the price of its new product, it has only done so in dollars - 249 - so we're waiting to see what it will cost in euros.
