AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB review: Finally a powerful $350 GPU

For decades, the dance in GPU land had almost become a predictable affair: NVIDIA releases a giant shady power, and AMD warms itself to scrambling for a budget alternative. Recently, the script has been flipped. AMD Radeon RX 9070 series performed beyond expectations to prices that just made NVIDIA sweat. Now, entering the ring is the Radeon RX 9060 XT, which will aim to dethrone NVIDIA’s RTX 5060 Ti from the 1080p-1440p gaming venues. At an initial price of just $350 for the 16GB version (and just $300 for 8GB!), the 9060 XT certainly undercuts the RTX 5060 Ti’s $429 price tag, trading punches in pure gaming strength. Could this be the budget kingward gamers have been waiting for?

Forget about the speed; funny enough, they’re playing long. While NVIDIA flexes with GDDR7 bursting at 448 GB/s, AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT has an ace up its sleeve-an enormous 16GB of memory. Sure, it’s “only” GDDR6, but in modern AAA games brimming with hyper-realistic textures and 3D environments, sheer memory size trumps bandwidth. Think of it this way: NVIDIA has a Ferrari engine, AMD has a semi-truck full of fuel. Less than 400 bucks, the RX 9060 XT is not just a contender for the value title but rather the undisputed champion of value, letting people crank up the settings and dive into immersive worlds without compromise.

Gigabyte

AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT

For $350, the Radeon RX 9060 XT opens an entire world of running smooth games at 1080p and 1440p. Maybe not at the very top of the charts, but this card is such tremendous value-for-money, delivering just that middle ground performance that most gamers can be happy with without having to fork out sales tax.

Pros

• Excellent 1080p and 1440p performance
• Affordable retail price
• Solid cooling
• FSR 4 and frame gen is great when available

Cons

• Limited support for FSR 4 upscaling

$350 at AMD

What is the Radeon RX 9060 Ti?

Radeon RX 9060 XT is the affordable champion of the RX 9000 series from AMD. Think of it as your entry to next-gen gaming without having to blow your entire paycheck (would-be if you could really get this hitting the street price of 500 bucks; street price is off the charts!).

It’s a fast beast under the hood, with 32 RDNA 4 compute units, 32 RT accelerators for exquisite ray-tracing, and 64 AI accelerators for extra doses of smarts. Somehow it gets the job done at a clock speed of 3.1GHz while being good enough to keep power draw below 180W.

Curious for a comparison? For a bit more price, it flaunts 56 compute units on the RX 9070 ($549 MSRP), while the RX 9070 XT ($599 MSRP) takes things up another eight notches. Thus, the RX 9060 XT says that next-gen gaming need not be expensive.

Aspire to get the words out and speak over it. The newly minted hardware does not just serve as a competitor; it is straight up running past the original. Do you remember the budget $329 card with its 16GB VRAM and 288 GB/s bandwidth? Take those specs, load massive power, and tumble the former. While rigorous dollars flirted with 1440p gaming, the 9060 XT is committed to it with serious hardware upgrades. AMD confesses a 46% increase in performance in over forty games, and I can attest that my own tests also support the claim: the card can stand tall.

For review, Gigabyte’s RX 9060 XT arrived with a fairly basic cooler: three huge, crusty fans blowing air on a copper heatsink quite familiar from other models. No vapor chamber. No exotic alloy. Just some good, solid performance on practical grounds. Or did Gigabyte perhaps sacrifice the cooling efficiency for the price? Let’s see.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

What’s good about the Radeon RX 9060 Ti?

The consistent performances of the RX 9060 XT place it in the familiar camp of being a worthy contender, yet slightly short of the RX 9070. The back and forth is between it and the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti, with each one boasting specific crashes in strengths. 3DMark Steel Nomad saw the mighty 9060 XT flex its muscle, claiming a 200-point margin of victory over NVIDIA. Timespy Extreme was another win for 9060 XT, but by a slimmer margin of 90 points. However, that was the spot where NVIDIA turned red loud and clear by taking over Speedway with a massive margin of more than 1,000 points. Then came the validation of dominance courtesy of NVIDIA, as Luxmark HDR 4 witnessed that staggering 2,000+ point gap.

Right price or not, the true underdog fight is the competition between 9060XT and RTX 5060 Ti. AMD ray tracing has improved drastically with a claimed 45% improvement in speed with the 3DMark Port Royal benchmark as opposed to previous generations. Still, NVIDIA holds strong with ray tracing through the previously mentioned DLSS 4 AI upscaling and multi-frame generation. Imagine this: in an RTX 5000 series,threeinterpolated frames are created for every frame rendered natively, while AMD FSR 3 and 4 lag and can only manage one extra frame.

A Radeon RX 9060 XT placates the “overdrive” ray tracing settings of Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p, maintaining 80 fps solidly. While NVIDIA’s RTX 5060 Ti shoots way ahead at 136 fps with multi-frame generation, there still remains some untapped potential by the 9060 XT. An uncapped 120 fps rushes down to 1080p, and the ultra ultra ray tracing preset at 1440p launches to 90 fps. Throw away the tricks in upscaling, and just throw the weight of raw power of the 9060 XT. It is now a beauty with 114 fps in 1080p and 90 fps in 1440p.

The cool-as-a-cucumber thirty-second moniker is indeed the embodiment of its zero-all-distraction-free focus on 1080p and 1440p glory. No scorching temperatures here, for this card sips its power like iced tea during a sunny day. Under the 3DMark Steel Nomad stress test wherein 20 benchmarks run back to back without respite, the RX 9060 XT raised the temperature only to 54 degrees Celsius. I was pleasantly shocked because I have been used to GPUs heating to above 70 degrees Celsius in such kind of pressure. During idle periods, the card remains at a nice 42 degrees Celsius. This temperature is a bit on the warmer side compared to a vapor-chamber cooled behemoth, but that’s the way it should be for this class. Also, the fan was so silent under load that it was almost imperceptible to the untrained ears over the ambient noise. The card goes down laughing at all forms of thermal throttling.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

What’s bad about the Radeon RX 9060 XT?

The Radeon RX 9060 XT: A $400 Wonder (With a Catch)

Let’s be real: expecting miracles from an under-$400 GPU is foolish. While the RX 9060 XT offers fair performance at the price, it truly punches above its weight. The only real sting? It is as painful as watching paint dry when AMD rolled out FSR 4. Remember the RX 9070 XT launch? FSR 4 was almost like a unicorn and was present in very few titles such asCall of Duty: Black Ops 6.Now it is in about 60 games, so there is progress, but lagging in front is NVIDIA’s DLSS 4, looking good in more than 125 titles. C’mon AMD! Unleash the upscaling fury!

The RX 9060 XT provides an insane amount of speed inWarzone, while maximizing FSR 4’s potential feels like trying to find a secret menu compared to NVIDIA’s DLSS. First, you got to open AMD’s Adrenaline software; then it is off to the settings ofWarzoneto finally click the button to unleash the upscaling magic. Worth it? Yes. Everything cranked to the max at 1440p and FSR 4 running with frame generation yielded an eye-watering 254 fps. Killing frame gen dropped the number down to 174 fps, while turning off both features gave me a discouraging 110 fps. The performance boost courtesy of FSR 4 and frame generation is huge; too bad there aren’t more games running on them.

Should you buy the Radeon RX 9060 XT?

Bucking trends of being enormously pricey for smooth 1080p and 1440p gaming, if retailers do their fair bit, the Radeon RX 9060 XT would very well have been the budget hero. At $350, it vastly undercuts the $429 MSRP of the RTX 5060 Ti-and utterly slaughtering those astronomical $500+ asking prices with which you might be faced.

AMD’s chasing at the sub-$300 price below an 8GB RAM RX 9060 Ti. But the truth is: unless your entire gaming library consists of pixelated relics of a bygone era, stay far away. Extra bucks buy smoother experiences in today’s titles, lost to occasional stutters and visual compromises not worth seeing. Consider it a must if you’re aiming for clean 1440p gaming. The list headache saved for a few bucks is worth far more.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

Wrap-up

Remember the days when a stellar graphics card would not require a second mortgage? The Radeon RX 9060 XT is a glorious throwback. Forget chasing those 4K fantasies; Steam’s own statistics reveal that the majority of PC gamers are happy to play games at 1440p or below. This card isn’t about bragging rights for resolution addicts or those on rarefied air of refresh rates. This card is about pure unadulterated joy in gaming for the common player. That would be the sweet spot-performance for the common folk for reintroduction of affordable power.

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