01
Introduction
For those with a limited budget for purchasing graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 5060 is usually chosen for its high cost-performance ratio. However, there may be a lingering question: how big is the performance gap between the GeForce RTX 5060 and the flagship model, GeForce RTX 5090?
This is an interesting question. This article will share a comparison of gaming performance between the GeForce RTX 5060 and GeForce RTX 5090 to reveal the answer.
02
Parameter Comparison
The GeForce RTX 5060 was released on May 19, 2025. It uses the GB206 GPU based on the Blackwell architecture, manufactured with TSMC’s 4nm process. It has 3840 CUDA cores, 120 texture units, 48 raster units, 30 streaming multiprocessors, 120 tensor cores, 30 ray tracing cores, and 32MB of L2 cache.
The base clock is 2280 MHz, with a boost clock of 2497 MHz. It comes with 8GB of GDDR7 video memory, a memory speed of 28 Gbps, a 128-bit memory interface, a memory bandwidth of 448.0 GB/s, FP32 performance of 19.18 TFLOPS, power consumption of 145W, and a suggested retail price of $299.
The GeForce RTX 5090 was released on January 6, 2025. It uses the GB202-300-A1 GPU, manufactured with TSMC’s 5nm process. It has 21,760 CUDA cores, 176 raster units, 680 texture units, 170 streaming multiprocessors, 680 tensor cores, 172 ray tracing cores, and 96MB of L2 cache.
Its base clock is 2017 MHz, with a boost clock of 2407 MHz. It comes with 32GB of GDDR7 video memory, a 512-bit memory interface, a memory speed of 28 Gbps, a memory bandwidth of 1.8TB/s, FP32 floating-point performance of 104.8 TFLOPS, power consumption of 575W, and a suggested retail price of $1999.
03
Test Platform Configuration
The main configurations are as follows:
The processor is a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the motherboard is an ASRock X670E PG Lightning, the memory is 32GB of DDR5 at 6000MHz, the graphics cards are the GeForce RTX 5060 8GB and GeForce RTX 5090 Ti 32GB, the storage consists of two Samsung 970 SSDs, and the operating system is Windows 11.
04
Game Testing (RTX 5060 8GB or 5090 32GB)
The following tests cover seven games, all run in 1440P quality mode. In the images, the left side represents the GeForce RTX 5060 platform, and the right side represents the GeForce RTX 5090 platform.
Game 1: God of War
GeForce RTX 5060:
- Avg FPS: 76
- 1% Low FPS: 73
- Frame Time: 13.5ms
- CPU Usage: 13%
- CPU Power: 83W
- CPU Temp: 67°C
- RAM: 12.8GB
- GPU Usage: 100%
- VRAM Usage: 6.5GB
- GPU Power: 149W
- GPU Temp: 57°C
GeForce RTX 5090:
- Avg FPS: 240
- 1% Low FPS: 210
- Frame Time: 4.1ms
- CPU Usage: 39%
- CPU Power: 92W
- CPU Temp: 72°C
- RAM: 12.5GB
- GPU Usage: 99%
- VRAM Usage: 7.3GB
- GPU Power: 446W
- GPU Temp: 59°C
Performance Gap:
- Avg FPS higher by 184 (≈3.2×)
- 1% Low higher by 137 FPS
- Frame time 9ms lower
Game 2: Ghostwire: Tokyo
GeForce RTX 5060:
- Avg FPS: 54
- 1% Low FPS: 51
- Frame Time: 17.7ms
- CPU Usage: 9%
- CPU Power: 39W
- CPU Temp: 47°C
- RAM: 10.9GB
- GPU Usage: 100%
- VRAM Usage: 6.7GB
- GPU Power: 150W
- GPU Temp: 58°C
GeForce RTX 5090:
- Avg FPS: 186
- 1% Low FPS: 160
- Frame Time: 5.3ms
- CPU Usage: 29%
- CPU Power: 73W
- CPU Temp: 58°C
- RAM: 10.7GB
- GPU Usage: 96%
- VRAM Usage: 6.7GB
- GPU Power: 472W
- GPU Temp: 60°C
Performance Gap:
- Avg FPS higher by 132 (≈3.1×)
- 1% Low higher by 109 FPS
- Frame time 12ms lower
Game 3: Cyberpunk 2077
GeForce RTX 5060:
- Avg FPS: 46
- 1% Low FPS: 32
- Frame Time: 19.2ms
- CPU Usage: 33%
- CPU Power: 64W
- CPU Temp: 54°C
- RAM: 12.6GB
- GPU Usage: 99%
- VRAM Usage: 7.7GB
- GPU Power: 142W
- GPU Temp: 58°C
GeForce RTX 5090:
- Avg FPS: 138
- 1% Low FPS: 105
- Frame Time: 6.9ms
- CPU Usage: 77%
- CPU Power: 113W
- CPU Temp: 71°C
- RAM: 12.0GB
- GPU Usage: 94%
- VRAM Usage: 9.6GB
- GPU Power: 410W
- GPU Temp: 58°C
Performance Gap:
- Avg FPS higher by 92 (≈3.0×)
- 1% Low higher by 73 FPS
- Frame time 12.3ms lower
- VRAM insufficiency noted on RTX 5060
Game 4: Horizon Forbidden West
GeForce RTX 5060:
- Avg FPS: 65
- 1% Low FPS: 45
- Frame Time: 16.2ms
- CPU Usage: 58%
- CPU Power: 79W
- CPU Temp: 63°C
- RAM: 12.5GB
- GPU Usage: 99%
- VRAM Usage: 7.4GB
- GPU Power: 139W
- GPU Temp: 54°C
GeForce RTX 5090:
- Avg FPS: 166
- 1% Low FPS: 118
- Frame Time: 8.4ms
- CPU Usage: 69%
- CPU Power: 109W
- CPU Temp: 69°C
- RAM: 11.9GB
- GPU Usage: 94%
- VRAM Usage: 9.1GB
- GPU Power: 366W
- GPU Temp: 55°C
Performance Gap:
- Avg FPS higher by 101 (≈2.6×)
- 1% Low higher by 73 FPS
- Frame time 7.8ms lower
Game 5: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2
GeForce RTX 5060:
- Avg FPS: 46
- 1% Low FPS: 36
- Frame Time: 23.6ms
- CPU Usage: 25%
- CPU Power: 58W
- CPU Temp: 56°C
- RAM: 17.2GB
- GPU Usage: 99%
- VRAM Usage: 7.4GB
- GPU Power: 143W
- GPU Temp: 56°C
GeForce RTX 5090:
- Avg FPS: 118
- 1% Low FPS: 85
- Frame Time: 9.5ms
- CPU Usage: 33%
- CPU Power: 86W
- CPU Temp: 64°C
- RAM: 15.8GB
- GPU Usage: 98%
- VRAM Usage: 8.1GB
- GPU Power: 377W
- GPU Temp: 56°C
Performance Gap:
- Avg FPS higher by 72 (≈2.6×)
- 1% Low higher by 49 FPS
- Frame time 14.1ms lower
Game 6: Black Myth: Wukong
GeForce RTX 5060:
- Avg FPS: 28
- 1% Low FPS: 27
- Frame Time: 36.0ms
- CPU Usage: 7%
- CPU Power: 38W
- CPU Temp: 47°C
- RAM: 11.9GB
- GPU Usage: 99%
- VRAM Usage: 6.5GB
- GPU Power: 148W
- GPU Temp: 57°C
GeForce RTX 5090:
- Avg FPS: 85
- 1% Low FPS: 78
- Frame Time: 11.5ms
- CPU Usage: 21%
- CPU Power: 71W
- CPU Temp: 56°C
- RAM: 12.8GB
- GPU Usage: 98%
- VRAM Usage: 7.3GB
- GPU Power: 425W
- GPU Temp: 57°C
Performance Gap:
- Avg FPS higher by 57 (≈3.0×)
- 1% Low higher by 51 FPS
- Frame time 24.5ms lower
- RTX 5060 platform unable to run smoothly
Game 7: The Last of Us Part II
GeForce RTX 5060:
- Avg FPS: 68
- 1% Low FPS: 54
- Frame Time: 14.5ms
- CPU Usage: 41%
- CPU Power: 54W
- CPU Temp: 57°C
- RAM: 12.9GB
- GPU Usage: 99%
- VRAM Usage: 7.5GB
- GPU Power: 130W
- GPU Temp: 53°C
GeForce RTX 5090:
- Avg FPS: 184
- 1% Low FPS: 102
- Frame Time: 6.2ms
- CPU Usage: 93%
- CPU Power: 106W
- CPU Temp: 70°C
- RAM: 12.7GB
- GPU Usage: 96%
- VRAM Usage: 11.1GB
- GPU Power: 351W
- GPU Temp: 52°C
Performance Gap:
- Avg FPS higher by 116 (≈2.7×)
- 1% Low higher by 48 FPS
- Frame time 8.3ms lower
05
Comparison Conclusion
As expected, throughout the entire comparison, the GeForce RTX 5060 was completely outclassed. Based on the data above, the overall gaming performance of the GeForce RTX 5090 is approximately 2.9 times that of the GeForce RTX 5060—roughly 3 times, which is the final conclusion of this article.
It should be added and emphasized that this conclusion has limited reference value. If the game quality is increased to 4K or other performance aspects are tested, the results may vary significantly. Therefore, this conclusion applies only to 1440P quality mode and is for reference only.
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