Nvidia was not keen to get reviews of the Geforce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB online, which is probably why most publications did not receive a sample, but rather had to either ask for Nvidia AIC partners or get it by themselves. While it was a general idea that such a version would not do good, and does not make sense, especially due to a higher memory bandwidth of 448GB/s, compared to the aging RTX 4060 Ti, which actually made sense to have an 8GB version.
While MSRP suggests a price difference of $50 between the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, due to the situation on the market, the price difference is actually higher, reaching closer to $120.
Performance-wise, the 8GB version shows rather weird performance discrepancies, where some games run significantly faster on the 16GB version. In some games, like Horizon Forbidden West, the 16GB is miles away from the 8GB version, which suffers from some weird performance impact. Of course, the performance gap depends on the settings, and apparently, The Last of Us Part II also suffers from big performance differences. Videocardz.com made a neat list of games that show a significant performance impact, especially in the lower 1% FPS.
Techpowerup.com noticed something similar in Spider-Man 2, The Last of Us, and Monster Hunter Wilds games, where the 8GB version simply runs out of VRAM. At higher resolutions, the difference gets up to 26 percent, with 13 out of 24 games simply running out of VRAM. When ray-tracing or neural rendering is enabled, it even gets worse, where some games even run better on the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB than on the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, which simply does not make sense, unless it could be due to how Blackwell architecture manages its VRAM.
In any case, it appears that the Geforce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB is not a good way to go, at least unless Nvidia somehow fixes those performance issues, if they are fixable at all. Currently, 12GB of VRAM is definitely a minimum as the Radeon RX 7700 XT is a better buy, unless you specifically want DLSS 4, or simply go for the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB version, where you would get both decent ray-tracing and DLSS, and most importantly, no performance hit.
