AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB review (XFX Swift)

The AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT is, I think it's fair to say, one of the most anticipated graphics cards of this generation. Gamers on a tight budget have had a tough time of it in recent years, and AMD's new entry-level card feels aggressively designed (and priced, no less) to hit Nvidia where it hurts.

At $299 for the 8 GB version and $349 for the 16 GB variant, the latter I have in front of me here, the little AMD card is not just looking to knock the $299 RTX 5060 off its precarious perch, but even aims to take a swing at the $429 RTX 5060 Ti. Everyone loves an underdog story, but in a GPU market plagued by inflated prices and less-than-impressive generational performance gains, the RX 9060 XT has its work cut out from the start.

So, what you're likely wondering is, does it give Nvidia's budget offerings a comprehensive floor-wiping? Not quite. But what AMD has come up with here is a cool, calm, and collected 1080p and 1440p performer for a very reasonable sum, and right now that feels like a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.

RX 9060 XT 16 GB verdict

I've had the XFX Swift version of the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT sitting in one of our benchmarking rigs for the past week, and it's rather impressive. While it's not quite been able to beat out our RTX 5060 Ti sample overall (AMD's claims that it's 6% faster than the RTX 5060 Ti at 1440p haven't proved out in my testing), it often comes perilously close at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions for a full $80 less—and that's just the sort of thing that might cause Nvidia to drop the Ti's price down in response.

Competition is a good thing, y'see, and the RX 9060 XT provides just that.

And as for the $299 RTX 5060? Fuggedaboutit. While the Nvidia card is $50 less, the extra performance you receive from the 16 GB RX 9060 XT is more than worth the money, in my opinion.

The RX 9060 XT might not quite have the goods to outright beat the RTX 5060 Ti in many of our benchmarks, but it's so close to it it makes the non-Ti card look poorly-equipped by comparison. Not to mention, the 8 GB RX 9060 XT is the same cash as the RTX 5060 at MSRP.

That being said, I'll be very interested to see if the RX 9060 XT's MSRP proves out in practice. This generation of GPUs has been marred by low availability, ludicrous retailer mark ups, and a host of factors that have made it hard to recommend any card—given what it'll likely end up costing you when you plug your details in at the checkout.

Ultimately, though, I have to review the GPU in front of me, and I can say that it's a good 'un. It's also been remarkably stable, only finally sullying its 100% reliability record once I pushed those GDDR6 memory chips past their stated speeds. My particular XFX sample isn't much of an overclocker compared to the Palit RTX 5060 Ti, for sure, but I'd wager that even in 2025, most people are more concerned with the apples to apples performance you get from either card fresh from the box.

And in the RX 9060 XT's case? I'd say it's got enough grunt to make the RTX 5060 Ti worry. Time will tell if that pricing holds out, but should you be able to find one for MSRP, it's the new budget GPU I'd plump for if I was looking to save a penny or two. Money makes all the difference at this end of the market, and an $80 saving goes a long way towards some shiny new games, a slightly better U, or even just a good night out.

Great entry-level GPUs have been far too expensive for far too long, if you ask me. The RX 9060 XT, though? It might just be the turning of the tide. Fingers crossed, ey?

RX 9060 XT 16 GB specs

When it comes to the specs, the little RX 9060 XT looks a lot like an RX 9070 XT, only halved. It's a Navi 44 variant built on TSMC's N4P process with 32 RDNA 4 Compute Units, 32 Ray Tracing Accelerators and 64 AI Accelerators, all of which matches with that basic equation—although with a stated 3.1 GHz boost frequency as standard, it certainly comes with a hefty dose of clock speed straight out of the box.

Those improved RDNA 4 CUs are key to AMD's recent catch up to Nvidia-like performance, in tandem with third generation RT Accelerators that mean the red team is no longer on the back foot when it comes to the increasingly-important ray tracing performance figures.

We're starting to see games like Doom: The Dark Ages require ray tracing capable (and ideally, performant) graphics hardware these days, and it looks like a trend that's likely to accelerate in years to come.

Memory-wise, both the 8 GB and 16 GB variants make use of GDDR6 connected to a 128-bit bus, with a total effective memory bandwidth of 320 GB/s. That's around 28% less memory bandwidth than you'll get from the RTX 5060 Ti with its speedy GDDR7 chips on board, albeit with the same bus size.

For the 16 GB cards that's probably going to be just about fine, but it might spell trouble for the 8 GB variant of the RX 9060 XT. The Nvidia GPUs with a paucity of VRAM may have a little more to give than the competing 8 GB AMD chip, but as we've yet to manage to get hold of the lower spec version that's all speculation for now.

Mention should also be made of those second generation AI accelerators, which allow the RX 9060 XT to take advantage of the latest, machine learning-enhanced iteration of AMD's upscaling tech, FSR 4. DLSS has long ranged ahead of FSR for sheer image quality thanks to its reliance on local, AI-capable hardware, and the RX 9000-series now has an equivalent of its own.

Multi Frame Generation has oft been touted as a reason to pick up an Nvidia card over the competition, but we've found it doesn't scale so well further down the stack due to increased latency. You can artificially boost the frame rate to gain some impressive figures, but the lower-end RTX 50-series cards show the limits of the tech when it comes to real world gaming experience.

AMD doesn't yet have an exact MFG equivalent, instead primarily relying on 2x Frame Gen as part of FSR 4—although major AI enhancements are said to be coming to AMD's tech in the Redstone update later this year. Regardless, at least when it comes to the bottom end of both company's current lineups, the AI frame rate-enhancing doohickeys look fairly evenly matched on paper.

All that being said, comparing AMD's efforts to Nvidia's with a specs sheet showdown doesn't reveal the performance differences between the two, nor what it's like to use one for real world gaming. The architectures are distinctly different, so it's in the benchmarks where we'll find whether the budget AMD card has the potential to give the significantly more expensive RTX 5060 Ti some serious trouble.

RX 9060 XT 16 GB performance and benchmarks

For now, we've only received a 16 GB sample for review, so I can't tell you how the 8 GB variant performs. I have, however, primarily pitted the XFX card against the XFX Swift Radeon RX 9070 OC, to give you an idea of what $200 extra (technically) gets you in the world of AMD GPUs right now.

To war, then. AMD's chief architect of gaming solutions, Frank Azor, has been keen to point out that the "majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p", and the RX 9060 XT is aiming for great 1080p and good 1440p performance. And, while the 16 GB variant I have on hand here seems designed to allay concerns of a lack of VRAM, it would be unrealistic to expect smooth 4K frame rates from such a budget offering, and that is certainly reflected in the benchmarks here.

At 1080p, however, the little XFX card puts on an impressive turn of speed. A mere two frames difference between the RX 9060 XT and the RTX 5060 Ti in both the Black Myth Wukong and Cyberpunk 2077 average results is pleasing to see, especially when you factor in the price difference between the two, and the proclivity for ray tracing in CDPR's game. In F1 24 the AMD card pulls five frames ahead on average, although the 1% minimum is a full 10 frames behind.

Total War: Warhammer 3 delivers the best overall result for the XT when taking into both the average and minimum frames, which is something of a surprise given it's traditionally a more U-focussed benchmark, especially at 1080p. I had a play around outside of the benchmarking tool to see what it was like in actual gameplay, and the little AMD provided a reliably high minimum result when paired with the mighty Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

...the budget RX 9060 XT delivers figures that would have been decidedly mid-range for the previous generation

Overall, though, the AMD card is slightly behind on average. Claims that the RX 9060 XT is 6% faster than the RTX 5060 Ti haven't quite proven out in my particular testing, but it's close enough across most benchmarks to show the performance is very much comparable.

1440p is a similar story: Close, but not quite the full cigar when it comes to beating the RTX 5060 Ti overall. Still, F1 24 seems to be the AMD card's jam, as it once again ranges ahead of the Nvidia GPU by a reasonable margin. And then there's 4K where… yep, you guessed it, the AMD card is ever so slightly behind on average once more.

Not that smooth 4K performance was ever on the table for either GPU—but should you be a fan of crunchy gaming, the RTX 5060 Ti delivers slightly more frames. A close run thing, though, no doubt.

It's the real world performance chart where the value of the AMD card becomes apparent, though. With upscaling enabled at 1440p (and frame gen, where applicable) the budget RX 9060 XT delivers figures that would have been decidedly mid-range for the previous generation.

Take note of the Cyberpunk 2077 result, for example. Six frames ahead of the significantly-more-expensive RTX 5060 Ti is nothing to be sniffed at, and is comparable to the figures I recorded with the RX 7800 XT when I played through the game last year with similar settings, minus some of the ray tracing goodies.

That particular card is still what I'd consider a great 1440p GPU in 2025, so the fact that the new budget AMD offering can match it is mighty impressive. And as for the ray tracing performance? It's much better than its older, bigger brother. As gen-on-gen comparisons go, that's the sort of major improvement I can get behind.

And so, up and down we go. The RX 9060 XT is eight frames slower than the RTX 5060 Ti in Black Myth, a full 20 fps quicker in The Talos Principle 2, and eight frames slower on average in Homeworld 3. Pretty much the definition of trading blows, this particular chart, but still a good result for the AMD card when price is taken into consideration.

The real kicker, however, comes when you compare the $349 RX 9060 XT 16 GB to the $299 RTX 5060 8 GB. The AMD tiddler is roughly 14% faster on average at both 1080p and 1440p Native, and a whopping 23% faster in the real world upscaling and frame generation benchmarks.

I'll it, that last percentage is significantly skewed by a staggering 190 fps 1440p result for the RX 9060 XT in F1 24 with the upscaling and frame generating goodies turned on. We saw similarly astonishing numbers in that particular game in our testing of the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. Whatever FSR is providing, this particular F1 racing game seems to love it. DRS, perhaps?

Anyway, while it might seem unfair to pit the 8 GB RTX 5060 against a $50 more expensive 16 GB competitor (although that VRAM difference is likely to only come into play for 4K gaming, which neither card is particularly good at), it's still pretty impressive what you get in of extra performance for the cash.

Where the RX 9060 XT truly lags behind, however, is in productivity performance. Not that I think that particularly matters in a budget gaming GPU, but should AI image generation be your thing, you'd be far better off with the Nvidia card.

The Blender result is also fairly disappointing, although it's far from the first AMD card we've seen drop significantly behind the competition in this particular benchmark. Rendering games? Great. Rendering for work? You'll be wanting something else.

Overclocking

While Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs are reliable overclockers, I'll it to clenching my teeth when I push the AMD card above its usual speeds. With a 3.13 GHz boost clock speed as standard, it doesn't feel like there's a whole lot of headroom to play with—and the card as a whole feels like it's pushed fairly close to its limits straight out of the box.

However, I was able to achieve a 300 MHz overclock on both the chip and the memory with little effort using AMD Adrenaline's built-in tuning software, which works fairly well. Going much past this, however, results in some jarring hard locks, particularly when trying to eek a little more speed out of the memory.

What's also held me back from pushing the AMD card into the stratosphere is the coil whine. The XFX card runs virtually silently at stock speeds, but boost the frequencies and it gets very chatty, very quickly.

Call me a nervous nellie if you must, but when an overclocked component starts squealing under serious duress, I find it difficult to ignore. This is most evident in The Talos Principle 2, where the RX 9060 XT makes its displeasure audibly known at every opportunity when pushed beyond its specs sheet. Still, that could be a PSU-dependent thing, and is more of an observation of this particular setup than an outright critique.

My testing shows a decent two to three fps improvement from this relatively mild OC in most of our games, with the odd outlier result. That's enough for me to say that if that slight fps discrepancy between the stock RX 9060 XT and the RTX 5070 Ti really does bug you, a little light overclocking can help to close the gap.

However, I would point out that the overclocked Nvidia GPU is capable of going a fair bit further—although your mileage will likely vary from card to card as to what stable clocks and performance you can eventually achieve.

Our Dave found that the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT both benefit from a spot of undervolting, but it's no bueno on this particular card. Even the mildest -60 Mv undervolt causes insta-crashes in most tests, even with a 10% tickle of extra wattage to play with. I'm no expert overclocker, but I'd say the RX 9060 XT has had most of the juice tweaked out of it by AMD to begin with.

Which makes sense. This card is a little late to the party, and I would wager that's because AMD was keen to see what the RTX 5060 Ti was capable of before it committed to final tuning. It feels like a card that's been gussied up to near its maximum in order to give Nvidia a headache right out of the box, so those looking for an overclocking wonder would be better off elsewhere.

PC Gamer test platform
Supplied by Cyberpower | MSI

U: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D | Motherboard: MSI MPG X870E Edge Ti WiFi | RAM: Kingston Fury Beast RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) @ 6,000 MT/s | Cooler: MAG CoreLiquid i360 White | SSD: Spatium M480 Pro 2 TB | PSU: MPG A1000GS PCIe 5 | Case: MAG Pano 100R White

RX 9060 XT 16 GB analysis

I've had my ear to the ground over the past few months, gauging the reaction of gamers to AMD's new GPU lineup, and I know expectations have been high. After all, the RX 9070 XT manages to give the RTX 5070 Ti a proper run for its money, and many have been hoping that the RX 9060 XT would do the same for the RTX 5060 Ti, too.

And although the AMD card is slightly behind on average in many of our gaming benchmarks compared to the Ti, I still think it achieves its goals—excellent 1080p performance, good 1440p figures, low power draw and cool temperatures, all for a significantly cheaper MSRP than its direct competition.

What's absolutely key here is pricing and availability, and that's a hard thing to judge at this point

Which brings me back to money once more. What's absolutely key here is pricing and availability, and that's a hard thing to judge at this point. While I want to believe that, as AMD claims, the RX 9060 XT will be widely available for its stated price come launch day, we've all been disappointed before.

That being said, a look at our best graphics card deals page reveals multiple 8 GB RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti cards at MSRP or less, and a (relatively) small mark up on the 16 GB Ti variant. The 16 GB RX 9060 XT makes a whole lot of sense if it can maintain its $80 cheaper MSRP than the 16 GB Ti in particular, but should it prove popular (and I'm willing to bet it will) and retailers start to even out the price difference between the two, you're looking at a whole different recommendation.

I've been told by an AMD representative that the XFX Swift 16 GB model I've reviewed here has a recommended price of £315 in the UK. That's an encouraging thought, but again, what it ends up listing for on retailer websites remains up for debate at the time of writing.

As things stand, though, the AMD card seems destined to become the new budget darling of this generation. As someone who regularly recommends PC builds for this very website, I know how tough it can be to spec out a budget gaming rig in 2025, and how every penny counts when it comes to maximising the bang for your respective buck.

And while I wouldn't call the RX 9060 XT an exciting card, what it is is something more tangible. It's a workhorse, a reliable, cheap, chuck-in GPU willing to do some serious work in the graphics mines for much less than its main competition.

In short, it's exactly what we've been waiting for at the lower end of the market, and for that, it's deserving of some serious praise. It might not be the quickest card in its segment, but it gets darn close for significantly less.