Review: At $349, AMD’s 16GB Radeon RX 9060 XT is the new midrange GPU to beat

Now that most of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards have been released, it's clear that they give AMD and Intel their best opportunity this decade to claw back some market share and make the dedicated graphics card business a little less lopsided.

It's not that the 50-series GPUs have been bad cards, but a focus on sometimes-useful, sometimes-not AI-generated frames and a lack of major manufacturing advancements relative to the 40-series have eroded Nvidia's usual lead in performance and power efficiency.

That's the advantage AMD is trying to press with the new Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics cards, which at $299 and $349 for 8GB and 16GB are both priced and configured to comprehensively undercut Nvidia's RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti. As with the RX 9070 series earlier this year, the RDNA 4 architecture goes a long way toward addressing the RX 6000 and RX 7000-series' lackluster ray-tracing performance and mediocre power efficiency, and a relatively affordable 16GB version will help insulate buyers from the RAM limitations that are slowly but surely becoming more of a problem for 8GB cards.

With the usual 2025 GPU caveat—the difference between a "good" GPU and a "bad" one is whether you can actually find one and buy it for anything close to the list price—let's dive into one of the few genuinely exciting midrange GPUs we've gotten in a while.

RX 9060 XT specs and speeds

On paper, the 9060 XT series looks a lot like last generation's RX 7600 and RX 7600 XT. All of those GPUs have 32 of AMD's compute units, and all are connected to either 8GB or 16GB of GDDR6 via a 128-bit memory interface.

But AMD says that each RDNA4 CU is much more capable than in previous architectures—when the 9070 series was introduced, AMD said that an RDNA4 CU could render roughly twice as fast as an RDNA2 CU or 2.5 times faster for ray-tracing workloads. The RX 7600 and 7600 XT only improved over the RX 6650 XT by a few percentage points, but the 9060 XT should be a bigger upgrade.