Radeon RX 9060 XT Spotted With A Key Spec Ahead Of RTX 5060 Ti Showdown
Just like last generation's "x60 Ti", the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is expected to come in with both 8GB and 16GB models, and recent leaks have borne that out. Now, a new leak has seeded the idea that the Radeon RX 9060 XT will likewise come in 8GB and 16GB variants. This information originates with the Korean Radio Research Agency (RRA), which is a bit like the United States' Federal Communications Commission, or FCC.
It's pretty straightforward: there are two Gigabyte cards listed with the agency: the GV-R9060XTGAMING OC-16GD, and the GV-R9060XTGAMING OC-8GD. It doesn't take a genius to decode the model numbers and see that we're looking at a Radeon RX 9060 XT with 16GB and one with 8GB.
This and above image captured by 포시포시 (@harukaze5719 on Xwitter)
That same leak also includes a huge pile of model numbers for GeForce RTX 5060 Ti cards, too, though, including Eagle, Windforce, Aero, and Aorus models. There are only two cards listed for the Radeon GPUs, which could speak to Gigabyte's confidence in the Radeon RX 9060 XT SKU—or simply a matter-of-fact statement about the historical sell-through rate for Radeon and GeForce GPUs.
So both mid-range GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA will come with 128-bit memory buses and either eight or 16GB of video RAM. The extra memory can really make a difference, as we demonstrated in our reviews of the Intel Arc B580 and B570, where the 10GB and 12GB Arc GPUs readily outpace the 8GB AMD and NVIDIA GPUs in some of our tests.
However, AMD may be at a pretty big disadvantage against NVIDIA in this competition. That's because its graphics cards are expected to use GDDR6 memory just like the Radeon RX 9070 series, while the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is expected to use GDDR7. If that's the case, then we'll see considerably higher memory bandwidth on the RTX cards, comparatively.
That didn't help much at the higher-end because the GPUs are limited by raster performance, but the 128-bit memory bus was a considerable Achilles heel for the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti when trying to game in higher resolutions. The use of GDDR7 memory would dramatically increase the available memory bandwidth to the GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti, and might allow them to pull away from the Radeon RX 9060 XT in 1440p and 4K gaming.
Obviously, only time will tell and we'll be running benchmarks to find out as soon as we have hardware in hand, so stay tuned to find out if AMD can maintain its status as value kings at the mainstream performance tier.
