Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT GPU Review: AMD's RTX 5060 Rival Debuts
Our Test System Configuration:
| Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (4.7GHz - 5.2GHz, 8-Core) MSI X870E Carbon WiFi 32GB G.SKILL DDR5-6000 Samsung SSD 990 Integrated Audio / Network Radeon RX 7600 XT (16GB) Radeon RX 7700 XT Radeon RX 9060 XT (16GB) Radeon RX 9070 GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GeForce RTX 4070 GeFoce RTX 5070 MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti GeForce RTX 5070 Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 24H2 AMD Radeon v25.5.1 NVIDIA Drivers v572.50 / v575.94 |
Benchmarks Used: MLPerf Client Geekbench AI Procyon AI Text Generation Procyon AI Stable Diffusion XL Blender v4.3 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v4.3.1 V-Ray UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition Games Tested: Assassin's Creed Mirage Black Myth Wukon Homeworld 3 Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Cyberpunk 2077 (press beta) The Talos Principle II F1 24 |
MLPerf Client Benchmarks
The MLPerf Client benchmark was designed by MLCommons to evaluate machine learning inference tasks on PCs. It focuses on client form factors and aims to measure how well different hardware and software configurations handle four different AI workloads using a single model. It supports DirectML via ONNX Runtime for a wide range of hardware, but Intel also gets a specialized OpenVINO path for now. Participants in MLCommons are also able to optimize the models for their hardware, but must meet strict guidelines for accuracy.
The MLPerf Client benchmark shows the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC outperforming the previous-gen Radeon RX 7600 XT by a wide margin, but it couldn't quite catch the Radeon RX 7700 XT. And it trailed the rest of the pack considerably.
Geekbench AI Testing
Geekbench AI is a cross-platform benchmark tool designed to evaluate the performance of AI workloads on a wide range devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. It measures the performance of CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs (Neural Processing Units) across different operating systems like Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux with an array of machine learning tasks.
When sorted by the Half Precision score, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC lands about in the middle of the pack in Geekbench AI. It actually fares better in the single precision and quantized tests, however, with the smaller / bursty AI workloads that comprise this test.
When sorted by the Half Precision score, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC lands about in the middle of the pack in Geekbench AI. It actually fares better in the single precision and quantized tests, however, with the smaller / bursty AI workloads that comprise this test.
UL Procyon AI Text Generation Benchmarks
The Procyon AI Text Generation Benchmark is a tool developed by UL Solutions to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) on Windows PCs. It features real-world use cases and uses seven prompts with both Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and non-RAG queries. It tests various AI models like Phi-3.5-mini, Mistral-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Llama-2-13B. These tests were run using ONNX with DirectML, not TensorRT, which is optimal for NVIDIA's RTX series discrete GPUs, but unavailable in this test at this time with this particular test.
The Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC also landed right in between the older Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7600 XT cards in Procyon AI's text generation benchmark, though it trailed the higher-end cards and the GeForce RTX 5060 by relatively large margins. Note that the 8GB GeForce RTX cards fail the final LLAMA 2 benchmark due to insufficient memory, hence their omission from this final chart.
The Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC also landed right in between the older Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7600 XT cards in Procyon AI's text generation benchmark, though it trailed the higher-end cards and the GeForce RTX 5060 by relatively large margins. Note that the 8GB GeForce RTX cards fail the final LLAMA 2 benchmark due to insufficient memory, hence their omission from this final chart.
UL Procying Stable Diffusion XL AI Image Generation
The Procyon AI Image Generation Benchmark measures inference performance for image generation tasks. It includes several tests, with the Stable Diffusion XL (FP16) test we used here being the most demanding. The test is designed to evaluate a wide range of hardware from low power NPUs to high-end discrete GPUs and it can be configured to use different inference engines like NVIDIA TensorRT, Intel OpenVINO, and ONNX with DirectML. Unfortunately, the TensorRT engine hasn’t been updated for Blackwell just yet, but we tested it with ONNX to provide a point of reference versus the RTX 40 series cards.
The Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC fared slightly better in Procyon AI's FP16 image generation test. Here, the 9060 XT outran the Radeon RX 7700 XT by a good amount and trailed the GeForce RTX 5060 by about 10%.
The Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC fared slightly better in Procyon AI's FP16 image generation test. Here, the 9060 XT outran the Radeon RX 7700 XT by a good amount and trailed the GeForce RTX 5060 by about 10%.
Blender v4.3 GPU Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, and animation, through simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and even video editing or game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmark tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...
The Blender benchmark's various models has the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC finishing in its familiar position between the previous-gen Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7600 XT, but well behind even the much older GeForce RTX 3070 Ti.
Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that determines the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW video frames. The tool can be used to evaluate performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL or CUDA on a GPU. We're reporting four results here, at 8K and 4K resolutions, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.
At both resolutions and compression levels, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC's updated media engine and software give it a huge edge over the Radeon RX 7600 XT and it beats the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti in the 12:1 tests.
