AMD's new Radeon RX 9060 beats RTX 5050 and almost catches up with 5060

The new AMD Radeon RX 9060 8GB video card (without XT) is the fifth model in the RDNA 4 family. It appeared on store shelves rather quietly, without a loud debut. Like the RX 9070 GRE before it, this video card is aimed at the OEM segment — ready-made computers that can be purchased as a complete set.

However, that didn’t stop South Korean YouTube vlogger Technosaurus from disassembling the new desktop PC, pulling out the card, and testing it in various benchmarks.

On paper, the RX 9060 should occupy a niche between Nvidia RTX 5050 and my own AMD RX 9060 XT. The new model uses a stripped-down version of the Navi 44 GPU with 28 compute units, 1792 shaders, and 28 ray tracing cores. It is complemented by 8 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 128-bit bus. The frequency is slightly below 3 GHz, the power consumption under load is about 135 W, and the tested version was a compact version of the Sapphire Pulse. The reduction in the number of computing units compared to the XT (32 CU) seems insignificant.

Technosaurus tested the Radeon RX 9060 in nine modern games with 1080p resolution and maximum graphics quality. The results were interesting: The RX 9060 lost out to RTX 5060 by only 2% and lagged behind the RX 9060 XT by 6%. This is so small that it is almost impossible to distinguish between them with the naked eye without overlaying the benchmark results. But the gap with the RTX 5050 is already significant. The latter provides only about 80% of the frame rate of the RX 9060. This difference is already visible and can be felt in the game.

The behavior of the video card is interesting. The 3 GHz frequency is not a peak overclock, but the actual operating mode during games, until the power limit reduces it slightly. According to the blogger, overclocking won’t give great results, but the efficiency of the device is already high. Stable performance with top-end processors such as Ryzen 7 9800X3D and the more modest Ryzen 5 7500F shows that AMD has found the optimal solution for budget builds.

Synthetic tests confirm the overall picture. In 3DMark Time Spy, the RX 9060 scored 14132 points, in Fire Strike — 35511. This is 38% and 25% more than the RTX 5050, and only slightly less than the RTX 5060. Games like Cyberpunk 2077, God of War (2018), and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 showed FPS so close to the RTX 5060 that for most players the extra cost would not make sense — at least if the card could be simply bought in a store.

There are also limitations: The RX 9060 in 2025 is still an 8GB model, so the margin of safety for the next wave of games is not very large, especially with ray tracing enabled. The 16GB RX 9060 XT will stay relevant for longer (as will most 16GB cards), especially at 1080p, but it costs more and consumes more power. If AMD ever brings the RX 9060 to the global retail market, it could become the price-to-performance leader in this segment, but for now it’s a quiet “killer” for OEM systems only.

Source: tomshardware