NVIDIA RTX 5050 sighting at EEC sparks hope that a true budget Blackwell GPU could be inbound

PC gamers on a tighter budget have just had their hopes raised that NVIDIA might produce a truly affordable Blackwell graphics card in the form of an RTX 5050 desktop GPU.

This stems from a filing with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) by Zotac, which encompasses the existing Blackwell GPUs, and soon to be released RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 models, along with RTX 5060 Ti and 5060 (still unofficial, but heavily rumored for a release in the near future - supposedly in April, or that's the latest guesstimate).

The real eye-opener here was the mention of an RTX 5050, though, which hasn't even been rumored (not on the desktop - there has been speculation about the GPU in laptop form numerous times).

Of course, if you've followed hardware rumors for any length of time, you'll realize that an EEC filing is far from a concrete indication that a mentioned product is going to end up rolling off the production lines.

Often, card manufacturers like Zotac will speculatively file a whole range of models. We've seen an RTX 5090 Ti Super (can you imagine?) filed in the past, by Palit, for example, which also mentioned an RTX 5050 and 5050 Ti in a clearly sweeping load of placeholder entries.

What makes this Zotac filing more interesting is that it's not wildly speculative, like that Palit effort, but more believable (and we should note that it's only just been filed). The only wild card here is the mention of the RTX 5050.

Stay skeptical out there

It's far from conclusive evidence, of course, and we remain pretty dubious about the prospect of an RTX 5050 - at least on the desktop - mainly because there's been zero mention of this on the grapevine. Even the laptop RTX 5050 hasn't been the subject of all that much chatter.

NVIDIA did have an RTX 3050 on the desktop, but skipped this model for Lovelace, where the lowest tier was the RTX 4060. There was, of course, a laptop RTX 4050 graphics card, and because the rumors are shaping up to make it seem like there's only a mobile RTX 5050, it just feels more likely that NVIDIA might stick with the same scheme as the last generation, and skip this model on desktop again.

It's also worth noting that an RTX 4050 desktop GPU was filed at the EEC, too - and nothing ever came of that (or some other rumors that were floating about for a while).

Still, with this current generation, there may be a gap in the low-end of the GPU spectrum that Team Green needs to fill. We shall see, but past history also tells us that NVIDIA isn't all that concerned about catering for more affordable graphics cards. So yes, as mentioned, we're very much still on the skeptical side of the fence here.