With the Radeon RX 9070 series announced and soon to be launched, AMD has also teased its next lineup in the form of RX 9060 series. While nothing is known of the hardware thus far, recent EEC filings has gave us some clues: the upcoming Radeon RX 9060 XT is likely to feature two variants – one in 16GB, and one in 8GB flavor.
Radeon RX 9060 XT Spotted
The image below shows the registered GPU model names by Acer, one of AMD’s board partners and a relatively new entrant in the discrete GPU scene. Eight mentions of the RX 9060 XT has been found in this particular entry, which includes Acer’s premium Predator Bifrost line and the mainstream Nitro model; each of those are also further split into 16GB and 8GB variants.
Perhaps coincidentally, NVIDIA reportedly will also release its RTX 5060 Ti GPU in the same manner; though both GPU companies have employed similar strategy for its mid-range offerings last year with the 128-bit memory bus, which meant the memory capacity can only be the multiply of 8 (3Gb modules only exist in GDDR7, and it’s only available in RTX 5090 Laptop GPU thus far).
Releasing an 8GB card in this day and age is perhaps not a great idea, given that GPUs with 12GB are already facing VRAM limitations in some games due to ever-increasing demands with ray tracing become more prevalent in modern titles. As such, the RX 9060 XT in 8GB form will certainly be heavily bottlenecked, so unless you play games that are old and lightweight enough to not exceed the capacity, it’s best to avoid it (also for futureproofing’s sake).
AMD has already announced that the RX 9060 series will launch sometime in Q2, so we’re likely a month or two away from launch. Perhaps an official announcement in CES (which is in late May this year)? Time will tell.
Pokdepinion: Not sure if I like the idea of 8GB cards in mid-range these days. Wouldn’t 12GB over 192-bit still work for this tier?
