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AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT Could Do Budget GPUs Better Than Nvidia

In the battle of the low-end, 60-class graphics cards, AMD wants to see if it can pull off the same sucker punch of price and performance it gave Nvidia during the launch of its mid-range GPUs. The graphics card maker offered the first, sparse details on its Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics processors late Tuesday at Computex. The card may offer enough power for your PC to hit solid gaming performance at 1440p resolution, similar to the $430 Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, on cheaper gaming rigs. The RX 9070 XT will start at $300 for 8 GB of VRAM, but the stinger is the version with 16 GB—AKA the one you want—is only $50 more.

The Radeon RX 9060 XT is the step down in GPU performance from the RX 9070 that AMD launched back in March. It’s based on the same RDNA 4 microarchitecture of the mid-range cards, but with 32 of the company’s latest compute units compared to the 56 on the higher-end card. The GPU comes with two options: one with 8 GB and another with 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. The version with more memory will be better for your rig long-term, especially if you plan to hook your PC up to a 1440p monitor and run the latest, more graphically intensive games. Both versions of the card will launch June 5.

AMD did not offer us the full range of specs before its Tuesday press conference, which makes it hard to pin down just where this GPU will land in terms of raw performance compared to Nvidia’s latest cards. While the number of RDNA 4 compute units—the core clusters on AMD cards that process the thousands of calculations necessary for graphically intensive tasks—offers a vague impression of better performance from the enhanced RDNA 4 compute units compared to the last-gen RX 7600 XT, AMD hasn’t offered much apples-to-apples FPS comarisons between competing GPUs (AMD compared the 16 GB version of the 9060 XT with the 8 GB 5060 Ti). The card will also be using smaller Navi 44 silicon on the chips compared to the Navi 48 on the 70-level cards. Finally, the new GPU runs on a 3.13GHz boost clock and has between 150W and 182W of board power compared to the 2.54 GHz clock and 304W board power on the company’s Radeon RX 9070 XT.

AMD didn’t offer any word on a non-XT variant, and we may need to wait a while more for a lower-level, lower costed AMD GPU. The 9060 XT will require a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface, the same as its other cards. AMD doesn’t craft its own GPUs and instead relies on AIC (add-in card) makers to produce its cards. We’ll update this article if AMD announces details on price or availability during its Computex keynote.

The crown jewel of AMD’s current lineup of graphics cards is the RX 9070 XT. AMD made headlines when it set the suggested sale price of the GPU at $600, only $50 more than the 9070, but it packs enough performance to get playable framerates out of multiple intensive games at 4K with a fair amount of ray tracing settings turned up. Unfortunately, because of a combination of tariffs and stock woes, the 9070 XT ended up priced at over $800 and as high as $1,000 at some online retailers.

We’ve seen prices fluctuate regularly over the past several months, but a near 20% price inflation to what should be a mid-range card is simply too much to stomach. However, the lower-end GPUs are faring better. The RTX 5060 Ti MSRP is set at $450, and the lowest price we’ve seen so far is $480. The $300 RTX 5060 is sitting closer to $320 from some AIC makers like Gigabyte. A fair number of Nvidia’s lowest-end GPUs are currently listed as “Out of Stock” or “Coming Soon” on sites like Newegg and Best Buy. Those buying a lower-end GPU are more price sensitive than people who can drop $2,000 on an RTX 5090 without blinking. AMD has even more impetus to set a price people can afford, and make sure it can keep costs level when the card finally hits store shelves.

Update 05/21/25 at 7:45 a.m.: This post was updated to include pricing details and more specs revealed at Computex.

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