Nvidia's RTX 5060 review debacle should be a wake-up call for gamers and reviewers
Nvidia has gone too far.
This week, the company reportedly attempted to delay, derail, and manipulate reviews of its $299 GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, which would normally be its bestselling GPU of the generation. Nvidia has repeatedly and publicly said the budget 60-series cards are its most popular, and this year it reportedly tried to ensure that by withholding access and pressuring reviewers to paint the new 5060 in the best light possible.
Nvidia might have wanted to prevent a repeat of 2022, when it launched this card's predecessor. Those reviews were harsh. The 4060 was called a 'slap in the face to gamers' and a 'wet fart of a GPU.' I had guessed the 5060 was headed for the same fate after seeing how reviewers handled the 5080, which similarly showcased how little Nvidia's hardware has improved year over year and relied on software to make up the gaps.
But Nvidia had other plans.
Here are the tactics that Nvidia reportedly just used to throw us off the 5060's true scent, as individually described by GamersNexus, VideoCardz, Hardware Unboxed, GameStar.de, Digital Foundry, and more:
Nvidia decided to launch its RTX 5060 on May 19th, when most reviewers would be at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, rather than at their test beds at home.
Even if reviewers already had a GPU in hand before then, Nvidia cut off most reviewers' ability to test the RTX 5060 before May 19th by refusing to provide drivers until the card went on sale. (Gaming GPUs don't really work without them.)
And yet Nvidia allowed specific, cherry-picked reviewers to have early drivers anyhow if they agreed to a borderline unethical deal: they could only test five specific games, at 1080p resolution, with fixed graphics settings, against two weaker GPUs (the 3060 and 2060 Super) where the new card would be sure to win.
In some cases, Nvidia threatened to withhold future access unless reviewers published apples-to-oranges benchmark charts showing how the RTX 5060's 'fake frames' MFG tech can produce more frames than earlier GPUs without it.
Some reviewers apparently took Nvidia up on that proposition, leading to early reviews where charts looked positively stacked in the 5060's favor:
But the reality, according to reviews that have since hit the web, is that the RTX 5060 often fails to beat a four-year-old RTX 3060 Ti, frequently fails to beat a four-year-old 3070, and can sometimes get upstaged by Intel's cheaper $250 B580.
And yet, the 5060's lackluster improvements are overshadowed by a juicier story: inexplicably, Nvidia decided to threaten GamersNexus' future access over its GPU coverage. Yes, the same GamersNexus that's developed a staunch reputation for defending consumers from predatory behavior, and just last month published a report on 'GPU shrinkflation' that accused Nvidia of misleading marketing. Bad move!
In a 22-minute video, GN claims Nvidia threatened to cut off access to Nvidia's cooling and latency experts unless GN agreed to do the thing you see in the charts above — compare cards with fake frames to cards without. GN claims it has the recorded phone conversations to prove it, which are likely legal because Nvidia was recording them too.
'Just to be clear, Nvidia, I am prepared to release them,' GN editor-in-chief Steve Burke threatened.
Recording every conversation isn't how companies and reviewers normally operate. There's been a serious breakdown in trust if we find ourselves here!
Nvidia is within its rights to withhold access, of course. Nvidia doesn't have to send out graphics cards or grant interviews. It'll only do it if it's good for business.
But the unspoken covenant of product reviews is that the press, as a whole, gets a chance to warn the public if a movie, video game, or GPU is not worth their money. It works both ways: the media also gets the chance to warn that a product is so good you might want to line up in advance. That unspoken rule is what Nvidia is trampling here.
Nvidia is trampling an unspoken rule
On Wednesday, May 14th, I asked Nvidia in a group press briefing: 'Are there not going to be reviews of the RTX 5060 before our readers are able to buy it?'
Nvidia didn't deny it. 'Units will be available from May 19th,' was Nvidia GeForce PR boss Ben Berraondo's response, seemingly implying that a lack of early supplies of the GPU, not an underhanded campaign to influence early reviews, would be to blame for the gap.
Earlier in the same briefing, Hardwareluxx 's Andreas Schilling wrote a similar question and got a similar answer: 'Could you share your thought on why Nvidia is going to release the driver for RTX 5060 with availability and not giving us the chance to do our reviews prior to this?'
Berraondo answered, 'We are focused on delivering a great day-one experience for GeForce RTX 5060 gamers with our Game Ready Driver that will be available to everyone on May 19.'
But as GamersNexus and other publications soon revealed, not 'everyone' had to wait until the 19th to start testing. Nvidia didn't respond to repeated requests for comment about the GamersNexus allegations.
It wasn't Nvidia's only misleading statement about the card. During that same Wednesday briefing, rather than sharing Nvidia's benchmark charts, GeForce product management director Justin Walker claimed the new GPU would 'let you play your games maxed out at over 100 frames per second,' including demanding titles as Black Myth Wukong at 130fps, Cyberpunk 2077 at 148fps, and Half-Life 2 RTX at 130fps.
I laughed when I read the fine print and saw what Nvidia meant by 'maxed out.' It meant a paltry 720p render resolution, DLSS-upscaled to 1080p, with up to three of every four frames imagined by AI — and even then, only when you paired Nvidia's budget $299 GPU with a decidedly not budget $599 AMD CPU, one of the best money can buy.
One of Nvidia's other pieces of news from that same briefing was that DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation is available in over 125 games and apps. 'DLSS 4 is the fastest adopted gaming technology in our history,' Walker proclaimed.
Does that mean GPU reviewers can no longer ding these graphics cards for marketing features only a handful of game developers bother to use? I thought to myself.
But no: as of today, Nvidia's website lists just 29 games with full native support for DLSS Multi Frame-Generation. The only way Nvidia can get to 125 is by counting games where players have to force it through Nvidia's drivers, which doesn't give any indication of adoption by game developers.
So now, I'm wondering: where else might Nvidia be trying to pull the wool over our eyes?
I can't quite understand why Nvidia would risk fracturing trust the way it did this week. I mean, yes, Nvidia now has fuck-you money from AI, and gaming can feel like an afterthought.
Nvidia's networking business is now bigger than gaming, which now represents less than 10 percent of Nvidia's total revenue. The company makes more pure profit from AI in a single quarter than total gaming sales in a year. It's no wonder the GPUs are in short supply at MSRP when their makers are richly rewarded for putting silicon capacity toward AI chips instead.
But that feels like a good argument for Nvidia to stop caring whether its gaming GPUs sell, not why it might feel the need to meddle with reviews. If the desktop RTX 5060 doesn't hit sales goals, the company will be more than OK. Nvidia would be less OK if everyone started questioning its integrity.
What might help explain this push, though, is Nvidia's seeming need to make its founder's new vision for gaming into a reality. At CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang kicked off a huge debate about 'fake frames' among PC gamers when he suggested they were the future of graphics — effectively, that the idea your game should draw each and every scene 60, 120, or more times per second will seem antiquated. That AI not only can, but should fill in the gaps.
It's not so far-fetched an idea: as my colleague Tom Warren noted in January, 'so much of modern gaming is already 'fake,' and it has been for years.' That might be why Nvidia has been so pushy about reviewers adding such comparisons to their reviews. (Nvidia has even bugged us to include MFG results in our AMD reviews, a request we've largely ignored.)
But in the end, Huang's claim that the $549 RTX 5070 would deliver $1,599 RTX 4090 performance didn't ring true. The thing about Nvidia's MFG is it needs enough real frames to begin with, or it doesn't feel smooth, and if it already feels smooth, you may not need the extra frames. It's not a silver bullet that can make a 1440p card feel like a 4K card and, according to Dave James with PC Gamer, it isn't enough to make Nvidia's new 1080p card feel like a 1440p one, either.
In one of the first real reviews of the RTX 5060, with video examples, James explains:
You're not going to be able to use MFG to be able to up the resolution on your low-end RTX 5060 to match your 1440p monitor, even with DLSS running. And you're not going to be able to use MFG to enable you to run at the highest in-game settings, even sometimes at 1080p.
The extra latency and low input frame rates either make it a latency spiking nightmare or the AI generated frames end up creating a ton of unpleasant artifacts as you run around whatever gameworld you're in.
Meanwhile, HardwareUnboxed published a review that shows the new 5060 may not be that much faster than the old 4060, even at 1080p. They found it 20 percent faster on average across 18 games, and as low as 8 percent faster in Star Wars Outlaws, 9 percent faster in Stalker 2, and 10 percent faster in Black Ops 6. At 1440p, the $250 Intel Arc B580 offered better 1 percent lows and is the superior deal if you can find it at that price.
We may never know how many PC gamers bought an RTX 5060 without seeing any such comparisons, because Nvidia kept proper reviews from arriving on time. But in many cases, it won't be too late to return those GPUs. Maybe Nvidia's bad behavior is enough to push us to buy AMD's new card or wait for Intel's next card instead, challenging Nvidia's 90-percent control of the market and, perhaps, bringing some much-needed competition.
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