AMD has very quietly expanded its Radeon RX 9000 series with the RX 9050, an entry-level graphics card based on the RDNA 4 architecture. Available in 4GB and 8GB versions, it goes head-to-head with NVIDIA’s RTX 5050. We suspected this card wouldn’t set the world on fire, but the initial benchmarks are even worse than that. The results published by the Japanese media outlet Hermitage Akihabara now give us a clear picture of its performance. And for the 8 GB version tested against an RTX 5050 with the same amount of memory, the advantage clearly lies with NVIDIA… And not just by a little.
RX 9050 vs. RTX 5050: Up to a 30% Performance Gap in Gaming
In most of the games tested, the Radeon RX 9050 8 GB delivers performance that’s 20 to 30% lower than that of the RTX 5050. In Final Fantasy XIV: Golden Legacy, the gap reaches about 23 to 27%. In Apex Legends, the AMD card delivers nearly 26 to 30% fewer FPS, while Rainbow Six Siege X shows a lag of about 20%.
The gap appears particularly significant with Medium graphics settings. When the games are set to Ultra quality, the RX 9050 manages to slightly narrow the gap with its competitor. However, the results still clearly favor the GeForce in the games selected for this comparison.
The same trend is observed in several synthetic benchmarks
Additional tests were conducted using Cyberpunk 2027 —as named in the source—and Doom: The Dark Ages. Wccftech, however, chose not to include them in its direct comparison, since the measurements specifically pit FSR 4.1 with Frame Generation against DLSS 4.X with Multi Frame Generation, which gives the RTX 5050 a significant advantage.
The synthetic benchmarks nevertheless confirm the trend. Significant performance gaps appear in 3DMark Speed Way, Port Royal, Steel Nomad, and Fire Strike. The situation is more favorable for AMD in Time Spy, where the RX 9050 comes closer to the RTX 5050.
A $279 price tag that’s hard to justify
The pricing strategy further complicates the situation. The Radeon RX 9050 is priced at $279, while the RTX 5050 is around $300. For an extra twenty dollars or so, the NVIDIA card offers about 20 to 30% more performance in the games tested. These initial benchmarks therefore put the RX 9050 in a tricky position, even against an RTX 5050 whose price-to-performance ratio is itself regularly criticized. The economic crisis and inflation are undoubtedly having an impact, but that doesn’t excuse everything.
