Gameplay Performance – 1440p Ray Tracing
Now we are just asking for it, by forcing on ray tracing options at 1440p, where we already had to lower standard in-game quality settings, but hey, we’re nuts, so let’s get nuts. On this page, we will look at the extended ray tracing options available in some games. Because the GeForce RTX 5060 is a budget-tier video card, we may lower game settings as necessary to try and find the best ‘playable’ experience. Note that for the video card comparisons, the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 7600 XT and ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 OC Edition are factory overclocked video cards, while the Intel B580 and AMD Radeon RX 7600 are reference spec video cards. Our main goal today is to see how much of an upgrade in performance the GeForce RTX 5060 is over the previous generation GeForce RTX 4060, and the competition cards equivalent to this same series and price range.
Alan Wake 2
Of course, nothing is playable, but what we think is interesting to take note of is how the Intel Arc B580 pulls ahead in performance in the “Low” Ray Tracing preset. The MSI GeForce RTX 5060 8G GAMING OC is pretty much bottlenecked here, and thus we see no separation between the GPUs in performance, except for the Intel Arc B580. Basically, you won’t be running ray tracing in this game at 1440p.
Cyberpunk 2077
Now this is exciting, maybe, we were actually able to run the “Low” RT preset in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p and get playable 60FPS performance at native 1440p resolution. With Upscaling enabled, performance is in the 70s. Two things here, though: “Low” RT does only enable ray-traced shadows, so there isn’t a lot of ray tracing going on here, no reflection RT at all. However, the MSI GeForce RTX 5060 8G GAMING OC can do ray-traced shadows at 1440p native resolution or upscaled, playable. The other thing is just how well Intel Arc B580 does in performance here; also, it is very noteworthy. The MSI GeForce RTX 5060 8G GAMING OC is a whopping 52% faster than the GeForce RTX 4060, which is a surprising performance uplift.