Introduction

XFX releases its Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB SWIFT OC today, its second most premium implementation of the swanky new performance-segment GPU from AMD. The SWIFT series is positioned a notch below the company's coveted MERC or Mercury series. The new RX 9060 XT is designed to offer maxed out performance at 1080p, with ray tracing. AMD saw ray tracing become less of a novelty, and more of something today's AAA games inevitably implement, and so put in the bulk of its engineering effort for the new RDNA 4 graphics architecture powering the Radeon RX 9000-series not just with generational improvements to raster graphics performance, but on a major leap in ray tracing performance. These architecture improvements help bring RDNA 4 up to par with NVIDIA. AMD also significantly improved the AI acceleration capabilities of its GPUs, letting it implement a proper AI ML-based upscaler for the new FSR 4 feature it debuted with the RX 9070-series. As of today, over 60 game titles have already implemented FSR 4, with dozens more in the pipeline.



Radeon RX 9060 XT introduces AMD's second chip from the RDNA 4 generation, the new Navi 44. This is a monolithic chip built entirely on the 4 nm TSMC N4P foundry node, which is a major upgrade over the 6 nm Navi 33 powering the RX 7600 series, which has less than half its transistor count. Navi 44 is maxed out by the RX 9060 XT, enabling all 32 CU present on it, which works out to 2,048 stream processors, 64 AI accelerators, 32 RT accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. You get 16 GB or 8 GB of 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface. Something unique with Navi 44 that its predecessors Navi 33 and Navi 23 lack—and indeed the direct competition from NVIDIA—is a full x16 wide PCI-Express interface. This modern PCI-Express 5.0 x16 host interface should come in handy in meeting the bandwidth requirements of the GPU even on older machines with Gen 3 PCIe, given that AMD is still making new processor SKUs based on the Cezanne silicon.

AMD claims their RDNA 4 graphics architecture introduces a 100% increase in ray tracing performance over the previous generation RDNA 3, which should significantly reduce the performance cost of ray tracing. It also comes with a vastly improved AI acceleration engine that gives the Navi 44 over 800 AI TOPS (INT4), making the GPU capable of the new FSR 4 and upcoming "Project Redstone" features that rely on AI ML models. A new shader workload management and out-of-order memory management together vastly uplift performance per CU, letting AMD achieve its performance targets without having to dial up CU counts (and with them, die sizes).

The XFX Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB SWIFT OC comes with a heavy aluminium fin-stack heatsink with four copper heat pipes, and a 3 slots cooler thickness. It relies on three double ball bearing, axial airflow fans to ventilate the heatsink. The cooler shroud is designed to maximize heatsink ventilation without appearing sparse. XFX has also given this card their highest factory overclock for the RX 9060 XT, with 2780 MHz Game clocks—the same clocks its Mercury series comes with—over the 2530 MHz AMD reference Game clocks. The card also comes with increased power limits of 181 W compared to the 160 W AMD reference. XFX is pricing the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB SWIFT OC at $400.