The RX 9060 XT rumour mill flip-flops again: we shall have an 8 GB version of AMD's card after all
As we roll towards Computex, and hopefully a whole bunch of PC gaming hardware announcements, I can't help but get excited about talk of entry-level components. Probably most of all, I'm excited about the prospect of an (as-yet uncertain) AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT announcement which will hopefully rock the entry-level graphics card segment. So I'm most certainly excited by rumour that there will, in fact, be an 8 GB version of this card launching.
That's coming from Benchlife, which says that, despite recent rumours to the contrary, "we have reliable sources telling us that there is currently no plan to stop supply or cancel it. As for the news from the market, it is just a rumour. The main reason is as mentioned earlier, it is entirely due to the reaction to the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti" (machine translated).
It's true, as Benchlife says, that Nvidia only sent out 16 GB versions of the card for review. Plus, there's the fact that some early RX 9060 XT listings that showed up were all 16 GB versions. However, it's unclear why these two facts would make people assume that AMD would cancel the 8 GB version entirely.
Whatever the reason, according to Benchlife's sources, we can still expect an 8 GB version in addition to a 16 GB version. We're hoping these will get announced at AMD's Computex press conference towards the end of this month. AMD specifically mentioned gaming in its announcement of this press conference, so fingers crossed.
Despite all that people like to decry 8 GB of VRAM as not enough for gaming in 2025, with prices being what they are, a budget 8 GB card from AMD might be just what's needed to spice the market up at the low end. Plus, we already know that even some big AAA games are fine with just 8 GB of VRAM—it's all game-dependent.
That being said, everything will, as always, depend on stocks. Without ample stocks, AIBs can charge what they like and people will still presumably lap it up.
As for what to expect in terms of performance, we have some indication that it'll be about half as powerful as the RX 9070 XT. Although this isn't official, recent leaks have it that the RX 9060 XT will have the same number of shader cores and whatnot as the RX 7600 XT, but with a higher boost clock.
Plus, of course, you'll be getting all that sweet RDNA 4 goodness, including FSR 4 upscaling and frame gen. Which, I might add, is a pretty impressive generation of that tech that all but closes the gap on Nvidia. For more speculation about the actual performance of the RX 9060 XT, though, you can check our Jeremy's story linked above, as he gives a good picture of what we might be in store for.
With an RX 9060/9060 XT launch seemingly just around the corner, the RTX 5060 being "available in May", and even RTX 5060 laptop GPU benchmarks starting to surface, it's looking like the lower end of the GPU market might finally—finally—be kicking into gear. I'll take more options over less any day of the week, 8 GB or otherwise.
Best CPU for gaming: Top chips from Intel and AMD.
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game first.