ASRock officially announces Radeon RX 9050 with 8GB VRAM — RDNA 4 card offers boost clock of up to 2600MHz (updated)

A few months ago, reports of AMD working on a new entry-level GPU began making the rounds, and today we've just got our clearest look yet at the rumored cards. ASRock has just listed the rumored Radeon RX 9050 on its website in two different configurations, 4GB and 8GB, but we have no word on pricing or availability. AMD hasn't made any official announcements yet, so we only have a limited amount of info to dissect, and it should naturally be taken with a grain of salt. However, the leaked specs from an official vendor, which have since been taken down, would herald the return of 4GB VRAM GPUs in 2026, not seen since 2022.

The RX 9050 seems to be using a cut-down Navi 44 GPU from the RX 9060 series, with 1,024 cores spread across 16 Compute Units. The leak from May claimed it had 32 CUs instead. ASRock's Challenger variant lists a 1,920 MHz base clock and a 2,600 MHz boost clock. The listing also recommends a 450W power supply, which is 50W less than the RX 9060's 500W recommendation, though we don't know the board power for the RX 9050 yet.

Those were the mutual specs between both variants — the only difference lies in the memory config. The 4GB variant listing notes 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM operating over a 64-bit bus, giving us a bandwidth of 144 GB/s. We haven't seen a 4GB memory pool in GPUs since 2022, when Intel's Arc A310 and Nvidia's GTX 1630 came out. All current-gen cards have adopted 8GB as a baseline, which already gets criticized for not being future-proof.

The 8GB variant specs listed would double the bandwidth to 288 GB/s thanks to its 128-bit-wide bus. There's a chance AMD is planning to sell the 8GB to consumers directly while keeping the 4GB variant limited to OEMs. We can't say for sure since ASRock is listing it as a Challenger card on its website, but things could always change. We did find the 4GB RX 9050 already included in a CyberPower prebuilt on Best Buy, though, currently listed for $900.

The design in the leaked images appears rather generic: a black shroud with silver accents and some RGB lighting. They show two DisplayPort 2.1a and one HDMI 2.1b ports, and the card is powered via a single 8-pin PCIe connector. In terms of performance, the 8GB model should cruise through 1080p gaming, especially with the help of FSR 4. Since this is an RDNA 4 GPU, you get the full benefits of the architecture, including better ray tracing and upscaling tech.

As mentioned earlier, the last GPUs to ship with 4GB of VRAM were released four years ago. The industry is going through a turbulent period given the ongoing component crisis and memory shortage, but this would be another level of desperation.

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