Introduction

AMD launched the Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card, its third graphics card from its latest generation powered by the RDNA 4 graphics architecture. We have with us the Sapphire Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB NITRO+, its most premium take on the RX 9060 XT, positioned above the Pure and Pulse series. The RX 9060 XT is being launched in two memory variants, 8 GB and 16 GB, both of which are available from today. The 8 GB variant starts at $300 and the 16 GB variant at $350, most AIB cards will cost more than these baseline prices though. The RX 9060 XT is being served up to the sizable majority of gamers who still play at 1080p, but also offers some degree of future-proofing for 1440p, taking advantage of features such as the new AI powered FSR 4. With this generation, AMD has placed a big impetus on improving the ray tracing and AI acceleration performance of its GPUs, given that ray tracing is now pervasive among AAA game titles, and AI acceleration not just enables new performance enhancements such improved image quality, but also paves the way for edge AI use-cases.



The Radeon RX 9060 XT is powered by the new 4 nm Navi 44 silicon, the second chip based on the RDNA 4 architecture, and is built on the TSMC N4P foundry node. It logically succeeds the Navi 33 chip powering the Radeon RX 7600 from the previous generation, although AMD has made a conscious effort to make its mid-range 60-segment SKUs not just capable of maxed out 1080p pure raster performance, but also 1080p with ray tracing, and enhanced by new features that allow you dial up resolutions, such as FSR 4, and the upcoming FSR "Project Redstone," more on this later.

Navi 44, on paper, is half the chip when compared to the Navi 48 silicon powering the RX 9070-series. It comes with 32 compute units, working out to 2,048 stream processors, 64 AI accelerators, 32 RT accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The memory interface is 128-bit wide, driving 8 GB or 16 GB of 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory, for 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and backed by 32 MB of on-die Infinity Cache. While AMD hasn't advanced to the newer GDDR7 memory standard, with rival NVIDIA offering 28 Gbps GDDR7 on its RTX 5060, it claims that the various memory management improvements introduced with RDNA 4 should cover for the modest growth in memory bandwidth over the previous generation.

The RDNA 4 graphics architecture is built to give AMD's product designers the most performance per mm² die-area, so they could maintain a price-performance edge over NVIDIA in the hotly contested performance segment. The company claims a significant increase in performance-per-CU over the previous RDNA 3 architecture. It also claims a 100% increase in ray tracing performance over RDNA 3, which should reduce the performance cost of ray tracing. There is a similar leap in AI acceleration throughput, now more than 800 INT4 AI TOPS, paving the way for FSR 4, the biggest upgrade to the FSR suite of performance enhancements. FSR 4 uses a new AI ML-based upscaler that offers superior image quality at every performance preset.

FSR 4 is the biggest upgrade to AMD's in-house performance enhancement. It introduces a new AI ML-based upscaler that takes advantage of the generationally increased AI acceleration performance of RDNA 4 GPUs. The AI ML-based upscaler is significantly more accurate than the shader-based model driving previous generations of FSR, improving image-quality at every performance preset. FSR 4 is as easy to implement as FSR 3, which should mean practically every FSR-enabled title could get the technology soon.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB NITRO+ is based on the company's latest style it introduced with the RX 9070 XT NITRO+. It offers a premium, classy aesthetic that represents its segment well. The design favors exposing more of the heatsink for better ventilation, without the card looking sparse. It also offers an elaborate RGB LED setup, quick-connect fans for easy cleaning, double ball-bearings for the fans, ARGB headers to sync your lighting to the card's. With the Nitro+ OC, Sapphire offers factory overclocked speeds of 2780 MHz Game clock compared to the 2530 MHz reference Game clock. Sapphire is pricing the card at $415.