While most observers gave a negative reception to the arrival of the RTX 5060 equipped with only 8GB, we were expecting AMD to go against its competitor for the sake of sport… But AMD has maintained its version of the RX 9060 XT 8GB while clearly trying to conceal it by highlighting only the 16Gb version during Computex. So, of course, it’s fair to say that at least AMD will be giving users the choice (if they can afford it) of opting for the 8 or 16GB version. However, it has been said time and time again that 8GB of VRAM is not enough to run many modern PC games without problems. So by lowering the settings, and making a few sacrifices here and there, you can indeed get by… But come on, folks, we’re talking about cards that are (and will be for the AMD offer) priced at over €300!
AMD was keen to defend its choice
AMD’s Frank Azor has defended AMD’s RX 9060 XT 8GB option, saying that most of the games played around the world are mainly e-sports. He claims that gamers who focus on these titles don’t need extra GPU memory. This is a valid point, but it also means that this 8GB version of the card will necessarily restrict its user to this type of game. With AAA titles, the two 8GB cards from the Reds and Greens will undoubtedly suffer greatly. The budget argument is also worth listening to: AMD insists that, unlike Nvidia, switching from an 8GB to a 16GB version is less painful (you’d have to go from an 8GB RTX 5060 to a 16GB 5060 Ti). However, the scenario of upgrading with these cards is never specified. While we don’t yet have any information to share with you about the behaviour of an RX 9060 XT 8/16 on a non 5.0 PCIe slot, we do know what happens with RTX 5060s… It’s just catastrophic, and you have to be aware of that.
