I know, I know we’re all hopped up about the RX 9070 XT and 9070 launch — I know I am. But looking beyond the potential big win AMD is on for with its first RDNA4 graphics cards, I’m also particularly excited about the potential for the rumored 9060 XT. Not because it’ll be cheaper again — it will be — but because it might have up to 16GB of VRAM. That’s going to wreck Nvidia’s long-term second-hand card market, which could have a much greater impact on AMD’s market share over the long term.
It’s all just rumors for now, and some of my colleagues are much less excited by this than I am, but I think there’s some real potential here for this little card to be a game changer.
Hitting the VRAM wall
Video memory, or VRAM, has been a front-and centre feature of graphics card spec sheets for generations, but it’s started to matter a lot more in recent years. While flagship graphics cards have exploded in their VRAM quantities, with the 5090 now offering 32GB, most mainstream cards have been getting by with less. It was only a couple of generations ago that the flagship RTX 3080 only had 10GB of VRAM, and outside of the top few models, you’ll still see 12GB, 10GB, or even 8GB.
The problem is, this is really not enough any more. Not for the latest games, and not when you enable demanding settings like ray tracing. Alan Wake 2 has been clocked using over 15GB when running at full tilt, 4K, ray tracing, all the beans. Other games aren’t far behind.
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DLSS can’t help with your card running out of VRAM when you enable 4K textures. Neural texture compression isn’t anywhere near ready to fix this, either. As other games start to raise their VRAM requirements for more modest settings, older high-end cards are going to be left behind.
Why affordable 16GB of VRAM matters
AMD has been putting more VRAM in its cards for the past couple of generations. The RX 6700 XT had 12GB of VRAM, where the RTX 3070 only had 8GB. The RX 7700 XT has 16GB of VRAM, while the 4070 only had 12GB. Even Nvidia’s new RTX 5070, which is reviewing very poorly, only has 12GB of VRAM.
These cards with sub 16GB of VRAM are going to be incapable of playing some games at higher settings in a few years. At settings that they should still be able to match based on their raw performance, but simply won’t be able to enable because of the VRAM shortage.
Enter the RX 9060 XT. This card is going to launch at some point in the next couple of months with a lower price than the $550 of the 9070. Probably much less. Let’s assume that over the long term it works out to around $300 — the high-end of RX 7600 XT pricing at the time of writing. That’s a $300 card that is going to be able to do things that some of Nvidia’s recent-generation high-end GPUs just cannot do.
That means in a year or so when people are considering buying a new graphics card, and they look at the price of AMD’s entry-level models, and compare them to the higher-end models from Nvidia on the second-hand market, they’re going to choose the model that can play the games they want to play.
How wide is your bus?
The only caveat to all this, is bus-width. As my colleague Monica points out in her preview of the rumored RX 9060 XT cards, AMD could ruin these GPUs before they even get out the gate. In previous generations, the X600 series of graphics cards from AMD have had their performance wrecked by limited bus widths and PCIExpress bandwidth.
If AMD does that again with the RX 9060 XT and 9060, my prediction may turn out to be short-sighted and overly rosy. Poor performance is poor performance, whether you have lots of VRAM or not.
But if AMD doesn’t do that… if it manages to make these cards decently competitive with whatever RTX 5060 Nvidia’s been working on, with the bolstered ray tracing and new FSR features, with lots of VRAM? AMD could be on to a winner that could stand a chance of competing for the most popular graphics card in the Steam Hardware survey. The same one that AMD barely makes a blip on in early 2025.
