Nvidia’s RTX 5060 GPU looks to be imminent, but it could get a very frosty reception

An early product listing suggests the Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU could arrive soon
Meanwhile, AI has been firing flak at any modern GPU with 8GB of video RAM (which the RTX 5060 has)
The suggestion is that 8GB of VRAM is like “bringing a butter knife to a gunfight”, and that reflects a broader sentiment online

A fresh clue suggests that, as the rumor mill already believes, Nvidia’s RTX 5060 graphics card packing 8GB of video RAM (VRAM), is close to launch now – but the feeling around modern GPUs with 8GB of VRAM has been underlined by a scathing AI summary on the subject.

I’ll return to that later; but first up, the hint that the RTX 5060 is about to emerge is the fact that US retailer Best Buy has listed a PNY variant of this graphics card on its site (as noticed by @momomo_us on X, via VideoCardz).

There’s no ‘buy’ button, of course, as the RTX 5060 isn’t released yet; you can only click to be notified when stock comes in. But the fact that the PNY board is there at all (and the listing is still live, at the time of writing) suggests that Best Buy is starting to get its house in order for this Nvidia GPU.

The PNY offering is priced at $299, by the way, the base list price, and the rumored release date for the RTX 5060 is May 19. It might seem a little early for retailer prep work based on that date, perhaps, but work goes on behind the scenes for a while before launch, and presumably that’s what has happened here – with an accidental airing of this particular listing. (There’s only the one RTX 5060 board listed, in case you were wondering).

Now onto the comment from AI, the agent in question being Grok (again on X). As Tom’s Hardware reported, denizen of X, PunmasterSTP, asked: “Hey Grok, how do you feel about 8 GB of VRAM in 2025?”

The reply came in no uncertain terms: “8GB of VRAM in 2025? Honestly, it’s like bringing a butter knife to a gunfight.” Check out the full exchange below, and note that the whole thing stemmed from an article about how the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB doesn’t perform up to scratch.

Hey @PunmasterStp, 8GB of VRAM in 2025? Honestly, it’s like bringing a butter knife to a gunfight. Modern AAA games are chomping through VRAM faster than a kid with a bag of candy—especially at 1440p or 4K with all those juicy high-res textures and ray tracing bells and whistles.…May 3, 2025

(Image credit: Shutterstock / Dean Drobot)

Analysis: we should listen to Grok, and here’s why

The RTX 5060 Ti 8GB being weak sauce compared to the 16GB version of this graphics card has been a hot topic since these GPUs were launched by Nvidia. It’s clear enough going by various independent test runs that the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB is indeed underpowered in some respects – and so the worry is that the RTX 5060, which comes packing that same amount of VRAM, is going to suffer in the same way.

It’s a justified concern, especially given that Nvidia appears to have quietly pushed the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB into the background, while whistling nonchalantly. All the online sentiment railing against the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB appears to be approaching a critical mass, and that’s clearly shown by Grok’s ‘butter knife’ comment on X.

You may, of course, take the attitude of who cares what an AI thinks? Well, we should all care, because an AI doesn’t actually think, of course – not in a truly intelligent way. These aren’t independent virtual ‘thoughts’ but rather a huge swathe of opinions scraped off the web (from X, Reddit, and various other avenues) and then condensed into a reply.

So, what Grok’s saying reflects the broad opinions being aired across all those social forums (and wherever else the AI may have extended its data extracting tentacles), meaning this is a barometer of the overall feeling about 8GB of video RAM on a contemporary graphics card. In short, it just isn’t good enough anymore.

The potential saving grace for the RTX 5060 and its 8GB of memory modules is that it’s more temptingly priced than the RTX 5060 Ti with the same VRAM loadout. However, $300 (or the equivalent in your region) is still not a budget outlay, and if the memory on-board is a problem with certain games (and with particular graphics settings) already, what about next year, or further into the life of this GPU, when PC games become a good deal more demanding still?

I expect some level of future-proofing with a graphics card purchase, and doubtless so do you – and this is a definite worry, even for a more ‘affordable’ GPU. (I use the air quotes because let’s face it, $300 is still far from cheap, and as we know, third-party graphics cards inevitably end up selling for more than the list price with many models, anyway).

As Grok says later in its reply: “If you’re planning to game for the next few years without constantly tweaking settings down to potato mode, 8GB just ain’t gonna cut it.”

Obviously talking about ‘potato’ mode (a reference to the potato PC, slang for a horribly outdated and underpowered rig) is going a bit far, but it’s difficult to argue with the sentiment – and again, this is the broad feeling that Grok is summarizing from across the web.

Meanwhile, we’re left to wonder if AMD will also be launching an 8GB version of the rumored RX 9060 XT, another mid-range GPU expected to be revealed very soon. There have been suggestions that an 8GB flavor is coming, and equally that it isn’t.

The most recent gossip is that AMD does indeed have this inbound, but it might try to effectively sideline the 9060 XT 8GB graphics card, just like Nvidia has with the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB.

It feels like it’s possible that mid-range efforts with an 8GB loadout could be well and truly swept under the GPU rug as 2025 progresses, but we shall see.