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AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB has a lot of promise. It’s not held back by insufficient VRAM, and it offers a good level of performance for a seemingly reasonable price. There are a lot of things to take away from this review.
On the one hand, it’s obvious that having 8GB of VRAM can be a serious liability in today's graphics card market. Sure, you can argue that the biggest differences typically happen at settings that aren’t as critical on GPUs that cost under $400, but while 4K ultra settings might seem a bit much right now, there will be future games that will show similar issues at 1440p and even 1080p. It’s the inevitable creep in memory requirements we’ve seen with games over the past few decades.
It’s also not just about games. There are other workloads — AI in particular, but also upscaling and framegen — that need more VRAM. Stable Diffusion XL ran just fine on the RX 9060 XT, but tanked on the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB and RTX 5060. Drivers might improve the situation, but there will still be AI models that can run on a 16GB card but not on an 8GB card. Frankly, that’s probably part of why Nvidia didn’t put more memory on some of its lower tier cards.
The difficulty with the RX 9060 XT 16GB is that, right now, the minimum price we’re seeing for cards that are still in stock is $40 higher than the official MSRP. On paper, it’s supposed to be priced between the RTX 5060 and the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB. In practice, it’s actually slightly more expensive than the 5060 Ti 8GB right now. That’s why we wanted to include both the 5060 and the 5060 Ti 8GB in this review — better late than never.
If you’re absolutely sure that you won’t ever want to run 1440p, maybe the 8GB cards will get the job done. But even looking at 1080p ultra, the charts don’t tell the full story. Sometimes, a game would load up at 1080p ultra and have extremely poor performance. Exiting and restarting would usually clear that up. Other times, while playing a game (or just running benchmarks), performance would suddenly take a nosedive. Those sorts of issues just didn’t happen with the 16GB cards, and rarely with the 12GB cards, but on the 8GB GPUs it’s a regular occurrence.
Back when the RTX 4060 Ti came out, originally in 8GB trim and then with a 16GB variant a month later, we were relatively harsh on the limited gains that 16GB offered. Over the ensuing two years, however, our feelings about the 16GB card have become far more favorable. There’s a lot to be said for having enough VRAM that you generally don’t need to worry about it, and if it’s only $50 extra to double your VRAM, that’s money well spent.
We really wish there were a better middle ground. You can make a good argument that a 128-bit memory interface is sufficient for a budget oriented GPU, but with GDDR6 that limits AMD to either 8GB or 16GB. GDDR7 offers a potential middle ground by using the 3GB (24Gb) modules, though Nvidia has so far opted not to use those outside of the mobile RTX 5090 and the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell.
In 2025, for a budget-mainstream GPU, even 12GB makes far more sense than 8GB, a capacity that we’ve seen used in mainstream GPUs since 2015.
If you’re looking for the best $350 (give or take) graphics card right now, AMD’s RX 9060 XT 16GB gets the nod. Nvidia’s RTX 5060 Ti 8GB can offer higher performance at times, particularly at 1080p, but when it comes up short due to lack of VRAM, it often delivers a noticeably inferior experience. Given the choice between being a few percent faster at 1080p but up to 20% slower at 1440p, plus the inconsistencies we’ve noted, we would take the 9060 XT 16GB over Nvidia’s 8GB offerings without a backward glance.
Nvidia could launch an RTX 5060 Ti 12GB (using 3GB GDDR7 chips) in the future, at a similar price to the 9060 XT 16GB, and that would change things. Then the wider support for DLSS plus Nvidia extras like MFG and better AI support would sway our vote. Even now, you can make a reasonable argument for the 5060 Ti 16GB — it’s only $40 more than the 9060 XT 16GB and offers about 7% higher performance. But if you’re looking at the RTX 5060 or 5060 Ti with 8GB, or the RX 9060 XT 16GB? We’d go for the AMD card.
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