Introduction

This is what you've been waiting for. In our Radeon RX 9060 XT 8 GB review we're taking a detailed look at the performance of the 8 GB model in AMD's new lineup. While the RX 9060 XT-series comes with both 16 GB and 8 GB models, the 8 GB card is still tempting, because it comes at a more affordable price point. The big question—what are the compromises? Will performance fall apart at higher settings? The Radeon RX 9060 XT-series positions itself as a more affordable entry point into the RDNA 4 family—with trade-offs that mostly come into play at higher resolutions and in potential future-proofing scenarios.



Both the 8 GB and 16 GB versions are built around the new Navi 44 GPU, a chip fabricated on TSMC's 4 nm N4P process and designed to strike a balance between efficiency and raw power. You get 2,048 stream processors, 64 AI accelerators, and 32 dedicated ray tracing cores—shared across both memory configurations.

Navi 44 is effectively half the chip compared to the Navi 48 GPU found in the RX 9070 series. It features 32 compute units, translating to 2,048 stream processors, along with 64 AI accelerators, 32 ray tracing (RT) accelerators, 128 texture mapping units (TMUs), and 64 render output units (ROPs). The GPU is paired with a 128-bit memory interface, supporting either 8 GB or 16 GB of 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory, yielding 320 GB/s of bandwidth. It also includes 32 MB of on-die Infinity Cache. Although AMD has not adopted GDDR7—unlike NVIDIA, which uses 28 Gbps GDDR7 in the RTX 5060—it states that RDNA 4 introduces memory optimizations that help offset the lower bandwidth increase.

RDNA 4 focuses on maximizing performance per square millimeter of silicon, helping AMD maintain a competitive price-performance ratio in the mid-range market. The architecture delivers higher performance-per-compute unit compared to RDNA 3. AMD also claims a 2× improvement in ray tracing performance and significant gains in AI processing, now exceeding 800 INT4 AI TOPS. These improvements support features like FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4), a major update to AMD's image upscaling technology.

FSR 4 introduces a new AI and machine learning-based upscaler that leverages the increased AI capabilities of RDNA 4. It delivers better image quality across all presets compared to previous shader-based versions. FSR 4 maintains the perk of ease of integration, similar to FSR 3, which should help accelerate its adoption in games already supporting FSR.

The PowerColor Radeon RX 9060 XT Reaper 8 GB is a baseline model for the RX 9060 XT—I bought it at the MSRP of $300. Of course this entry level price means compromises, for example, in addition to the 8 GB VRAM size, you get a smaller, weaker cooling solution, no RGB or other bling. But for people who just want to get gaming this could still be a perfectly workable solution, especially considering the competitive price point of $300.