AMD is offering this GPU as a replacement for the RX 7600 XT, which launched last year for $329. This card also had 16GB of VRAM, but had a slower bandwidth of 288GB/s. While the 7600 XT was more geared towards entry-level 1440p gaming, the 9060 XT’s hardware improvements make it much more capable. AMD claims it’s 46 percent faster than the 7600 XT in more than 40 games, and my tests back that figure up.
For this test, I tested Gigabyte’s RX 9060 XT GPU, which has three cooling fans versus a typical copper heatsink. There are no fancy vapor cooling chambers or fancy materials on the menu, but I wasn’t expecting much at this price point.
What’s good about the Radeon RX 9060 XT?
In all games and tests, the 9060 XT performed exactly as I expected: significantly slower than the RX 9070 and comparable or slightly slower than the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti. In 3DMark’s Steel Nomad test, the 9060 XT scored 200 points better than this NVIDIA card and was also 90 points ahead in Timespy Extreme. However, in the Speedway test, NVIDIA had a lead of 1,000 points, and in the Luxmark HDR 4 test, it had a lead of more than 2,000 points.
Despite these numbers, I’m still impressed that the 9060 XT can hold its own in the same category as NVIDIA’s RTX 5060 Ti while costing significantly less. AMD’s ray tracing performance has also improved significantly compared to previous generations, achieving 45 percent faster performance in the 3DMark Port Royal benchmark. However, NVIDIA is still at the forefront of ray tracing in gaming, especially with improved DLSS 4 AI and multi-frame rendering. NVIDIA’s RTX 5000 series cards can produce up to three interpolated frames for each natively rendered frame, while AMD’s FSR 3 and 4 (Fidelity Super Resolution 4) upscaling still relies on rendering just one extra frame.
Radeon RX 9060 XT could work Cyberpunk 2077 in “Overdrive” mode with 1440p ray tracing at a respectable 80 fps, while NVIDIA’s RTX 5060 Ti reaches 136 fps thanks to multi-frame rendering. Still, there’s plenty of room to record more footage: I got 120fps when switching to 1080p and saw 90fps with the less demanding Ultra Ray Tracing preset at 1440p. In terms of pure performance, the 9060
Radeon RX 9060 In 3DMark’s Steel Nomad stress test, which repeats the test 20 times in a row, the card only reached 54 degrees Celsius. I’m used to graphics cards reaching temperatures above 70°C under load, so the 9060 XT was a pleasant surprise. At rest the temperature is 42 degrees Celsius. This is higher than cards with vapor chamber cooling, but is average for cards in this price range. Even under load, I didn’t hear any disturbing noise from the fan, as I hardly broke a sweat.
What is wrong with Radeon RX 9060XT?
There really isn’t much to complain about with the Radeon RX 9060 XT, as long as you don’t expect too much from a sub-$400 GPU. However, it would be nice if support for AMD’s new FSR 4 AI scaling spreads faster. When the RX 9070 XT launched, the feature was only available in a few games. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and now more than 60 games are supported. That’s still about half of NVIDIA’s DLSS 4-compatible games (which so far include more than 125 titles).
On the RX 9060 XT, the FSR 4 user experience is still not as simple as enabling DLSS on NVIDIA cards. I had to manually enable it in AMD’s Adrenaline software and then enable it. Call of Duty: Warzone to activate it. On the plus side, I saw an average of 254fps when playing at 1440p with extreme graphics settings, FSR 4 and framerate enabled. With frame generation enabled but without FSR 4, performance dropped to 174 fps. And when I removed both features, the speed dropped to 110 fps. Obviously FSR 4 and frame generation help a lot, I just wish it was in more games.
Should you buy the Radeon RX 9060 XT?
Assuming retailers don’t overprice the Radeon RX 9060. For $350 the 9060 is
To get a price under $300, AMD also introduced an RX 9060 XT with 8GB of RAM. But honestly, I’d recommend avoiding it entirely unless you’re just playing older games at 1080p. It’s worth spending a little more to run the latest games smoothly, and it’s practically a requirement if you want to play in 1440p.
Summary
Radeon RX 9060 According to data from Steam, we already know that more than 80% of PC gamers play at a resolution of 1440p or lower. So for the vast majority of gamers, those who aren’t using screens with incredibly high refresh rates or 4K+ resolutions, this is the GPU they really need.
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