I do not doubt that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti’s GDDR7 memory helps it overcome the limitations of its narrow 128-bit memory interface. Still, as I said earlier, it doesn’t entirely fix the issue. In-game benchmarks give us the best idea of how much of a problem the 128-bit memory interface is, and they clearly show that the issue was much improved.
A technical glitch prevented us from testing the RTX 5060 Ti at 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077, but with the resolution set to 1440p and 4K, the RTX 5060 Ti outpaced the RX 7900 GRE and the RX 7800 XT, both of which have wider 256-bit memory interfaces and more memory bandwidth. The RTX 5060 Ti’s improved graphics cores and faster GDDR7 memory speeds enabled it to pull ahead despite this disadvantage in Cyberpunk 2077. It also trounced the RTX 4060 Ti.
At 1080p in F1 2024, the RTX 5060 Ti was slightly ahead of AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 GRE before it effectively tied at 1440p and 4K. The RTX 5060 Ti still holds the overall advantage, but it notably dropped further than the RX 7900 GRE when transitioning from 1080p to 1440p. This is likely due to the RTX 5060 Ti having less bandwidth than the RX 7900 GRE. The impact here is slight, but the issues that the narrow 128-bit interface can cause are more evident in Far Cry 6.
Typically, if memory bandwidth isn’t a problem, performance tends to scale linearly with resolution. This means most graphics cards tend to have their frame rates drop a similar proportional amount when moving from, say, 1080p to 1440p. When we see one card dropping faster than the others, it’s typically a sign of a bottleneck somewhere, and for the RTX 5060 Ti, that’s almost certainly its narrow memory interface.
In F1 2024, the impact of this was negligible. The RTX 5060 Ti lost 36% of its frame rate when transitioning from 1080p to 1440p, whereas the RX 7900 GRE dropped by 33%. This is enough difference to close the performance gap between the two, but not much else.
This is far more noticeable in Far Cry 6, where the RTX 5060 Ti went from having a significant lead over the Radeon RX 7900 GRE and the Radeon RX 7800 XT at 1080p to being slower than both at 1440p and 4K. From 1080p to 1440p, the RTX 5060 Ti dropped 22% of its performance while the RX 7900 GRE only lost 8%. Both dropped a fair bit when cranking the resolution up to 4K, but the RTX 5060 Ti remained behind.
A similar situation is observable in Returnal, where the RX 7900 GRE tied with the RTX 5060 Ti at 1080p, but the RX 7900 GRE came out on top at 1440p and 4K. This is again likely due to the RTX 5060 Ti’s memory-bandwidth limitations brought about by the card’s narrow 128-bit interface.
The RTX 5060 Ti was behind the RX 7900 GRE at all resolutions in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, and this likely wasn’t a result of the limited memory bandwidth. The bandwidth constraints of the RTX 5060 Ti aren’t likely to impede 1080p resolutions, which the performance in the other games we tested supports—the RTX 5060 Ti is generally faster at 1080p. Instead, AMD’s win here is likely due to better optimization for AMD hardware in these two games.
