SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB Graphics Card Review

In terms of raw performance, the Radeon RX 9060 XT aligns proportionally with its higher-tier sibling, the RX 9070 XT. However, while the 9070 XT exceeded expectations—punching above its weight thanks to a shader count that surpassed even the RX 7800 XT—the 9060 XT makes no such leap. With the same number of shader cores as its predecessor, the RX 7600 XT, it doesn’t push the boundaries in the same way. As a result, it lacks the standout appeal that might have been expected from a next-generation upgrade.

In gaming, the RX 9060 XT holds its own, offering stable performance at 1080p and 1440p, but it often trails the RTX 5060 Ti in many modern titles. For content creation, its performance in workloads such as Blender and other OpenCL applications leaves much to be desired, suggesting that the inclusion of AI accelerators may have come at the expense of general-purpose compute capabilities.

That said, the value proposition is not without merit. At an expected price of ₹34,900, the RX 9060 XT presents a reasonably compelling option for mainstream gamers—particularly with AMD’s FSR 4 now showing strong parity with NVIDIA’s DLSS. Still, had AMD opted to equip this GPU with even a modest increase in shader cores, the RX 9060 XT could have been positioned as a much stronger all-round performer.

Unveiled at COMPUTEX 2025, the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT is a mid-range contender from AMD’s RDNA 4 family of graphics card. And since RDNA 4 brings with it dedicated AI Cores, the 9060 XT becomes a good candidate for folks looking to mess around with local AI models thanks to the massive 16 GB VRAM buffer. With rumours afoot of NVIDIA scaling back on production of gaming graphics card in lieu of enterprise graphics cards, AMD has a great opportunity ahead to capture more market share. Whether AMD is well-placed to do so is a discussion for another day. For now, we’ll focus on how well the RX 9060 XT performs and whether it stacks up against the competing graphics card from NVIDIA – the RTX 5060 Ti.

The AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT has a suggest price tag of USD 349 which in comparison to the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti is cheaper by USD 80. Now that might not seem like a lot at first glance, but in the more competitive mid-range segment, even USD 20-30 can move market forces. Alas, that’s in an ideal world where the competing cards are equal in all aspects – raster as well as ray-tracing performance. Given that NVIDIA still has the lead in ray-tracing, it becomes imperative for AMD to maintain a cost difference to be considered a viable competitor. And in countries such as India, where pricing is largely controlled by middle-men, not retailing at the right price could result in the card getting ignored by majority of the gamers. 

Specifications

The AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT is what you get when you slice an RX 9070 XT in half. The gap in shader cores between the 9060 XT and 9070 XT is much larger than what previous generation of graphics cards from AMD had. This means that there are plenty of opportunities for more cards to fill the gap. Perhaps, a Navi 46 XT could be on the cards if we are to be hopeful. 

The Navi 44 XT which is the GPU at the heart of the 9060 XT comes with 2048 Shader Cores which are neatly packed into 32 Compute Units. Since each Compute Unit now features two AI Core, that means we’ve got 64 AI accelerator cores. And the entire thing is connected to 16 GB of VRAM via a 128-bit interface. That’s 322.2 GB/s of bandwidth, which will be helpful when gaming at higher resolutions. This is without switching up to GDDR7 in this generation. This results in about 25.6 TFLOPS of raster performance and 410 TOPS of AI performance at INT8 with sparsity. 

Like the RX 9070 XT, the 9060 XT also consumes less power than the previous generation of graphics cards, and the drop is decent. The RX 7600 XT and the RX 9060 XT both featured 2048 shader cores and the drop in power consumption is from 190 Watts to 160 Watts. And if you’re wondering about the 8 GB variant, then that consumes 150 Watts which means, this card becomes an easy replacement for gamers who might be running two or three generation old graphics cards. And they can perform a drop-in replacement because of the lower power consumption.

Then there’s the media engine which can encode and decode AV1, H.264 and HEVC. It’s great for content creators who want a card for video encoding without breaking the bank. Unfortunately, being a mid-tier card, you’d incur a significant penalty if you want to play and stream using the same machine. 

Overall, the Radeon RX 9060 XT brings a well-rounded specification set that balances modern architectural upgrades with practical power, AI performance and multimedia capabilities. It’s meant for 1080p and 1440p gaming along with a little bit of playing around with AI models. 

Performance

We have featured the recently launched NVIDIA RTX 50 series cards along with some of the RTX 40 series cards including the Super cards. We will be updating the graphs once we run through the RX 7600 XT to perform a gen-on-gen comparison of the RX 7600 XT vs the RX 9060 XT. The competing NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti has also been included so you can see how well it fares in its own price class. We’re also hoping to add the RTX 4060’s score to the mix. This way, you can see how the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT vs RX 9070 XT vs RTX 5070 vs RX 7600 XT vs RTX 5060 Ti vs RTX 5070 Ti vs RTX 4080 Super will pan out. Like always, we have a section for synthetic benchmarks as well as gaming benchmarks, with plenty of charts to showcase differences. Coming to the rig, this is what we’re running our benchmarks on.

Processor – AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
CPU-Cooler – Noctua NH-D15
RAM – 2x 32 GB Kingston FURY Beast 6000 MT/s
SSD – Kingston Renegade G5 2TB
PSU – Cooler Master V850

3DMark

3DMark is a popular benchmarking tool for graphics cards and gaming systems. It provides a comprehensive suite of tests that measure various aspects of a GPU’s performance. 3DMark includes several benchmarks, such as Time Spy, Steel Nomad, Speed Way, and Fire Strike. Time Spy is a DirectX 12 benchmark that tests the performance of a GPU and CPU in a variety of graphically demanding scenes. Steel Nomad, successor to Time Spy, is a DirectX 12 benchmark that focuses on real-time ray tracing and other advanced graphics features. Then there’s Speed Way, a DirectX 12 benchmark designed to test the performance of a GPU and CPU in a high-speed racing game environment. And for legacy benchmarks, we have Fire Strike which is a DirectX 11 benchmark that tests the performance of a GPU and CPU in a variety of gaming scenes. 

Ray Tracing

3DMark Port Royale is a synthetic benchmark that uses a real-time ray tracing scene to simulate the reflections, shadows, and other visual effects that are possible with ray tracing technology. Port Royale is a demanding benchmark that can be used to compare the performance of all current graphics cards with real-time hardware-accelerated ray-tracing.

Blender

Blender is a great 3D modeling and animation software that’s open-source and it is the preferred tool for folks wanting to get their hands dirty with 3D modeling. We used version 4.3. There are three scenes in Blender – monster, junkroom and classroom – with varying design complexities that provide an array of different textures that can tax the GPU properly. 

OpenCL Rendering

This benchmark utilises OpenCL to generate photorealistic results by strictly adhering to the physics of light, a process known as physically-based rendering. Rendering progress is gauged by the number of samples calculated, which can be visualised as “light particles” that have interacted with the scene and reached the camera’s sensor. As a physically-based renderer, the results closely reflect how GPUs are used in industrial rendering applications.

OpenCL Rendering Scene #2

API Performance

Basemark GPU is a nice benchmark to compare the performance of different graphics APIs between cards. We can use the same textures with OpenGL, Vulkan and DirectX 12 to see if the graphics card excels at any particular API more than the rest or if the performance is consistent across the board. 

Procyon AI Computer Vision

The Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark evaluates the performance of AI inference engines on your hardware using a variety of machine-vision tasks and popular neural networks. The benchmark scores reflect the performance of on-device inferencing operations compared to the same operations run on the CPU or GPU. This allows you to measure the performance of AI accelerators and compare different AI inference engines from various vendors.

AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming Benchmarks

Assassin’s Creed Mirage

Hogwarts Legacy

Cyberpunk 2077

The Witcher 3

F1 24

Thermals and Power Consumption

The AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT delivers notable gains in power efficiency over its predecessor, thanks to the RDNA 4 architecture and TSMC’s N4P process. Despite retaining the same shader count as the RX 7600 XT, it draws less power and runs cooler. In testing, the 16 GB model peaked at just 176 watts under full load, a marked reduction from the 198 watts observed on the RX 7600 XT. This drop in power consumption is particularly impressive given the RX 9060 XT’s higher boost clock and added AI and RT hardware.

Thermally, the GPU performs exceptionally well. During extended gaming workloads, the peak recorded temperature was only 63°C. This is well within comfortable operating limits, suggesting that AMD and its board partners have optimised the thermal design to prioritise quiet, efficient operation. Most scenarios saw the GPU operating in the mid-50s to low-60s.

AMD recommends a 450W power supply, making the RX 9060 XT a practical choice for mid-range builds without requiring a PSU upgrade. Altogether, the card balances performance and efficiency well, offering low heat output and modest power draw without compromising on features, making it suitable for compact or thermally constrained PC setups.

Verdict

In terms of raw performance, the Radeon RX 9060 XT aligns proportionally with its higher-tier sibling, the RX 9070 XT. However, while the 9070 XT exceeded expectations—punching above its weight thanks to a shader count that surpassed even the RX 7800 XT—the 9060 XT makes no such leap. With the same number of shader cores as its predecessor, the RX 7600 XT, it doesn’t push the boundaries in the same way. As a result, it lacks the standout appeal that might have been expected from a next-generation upgrade.

In gaming, the RX 9060 XT holds its own, offering stable performance at 1080p and 1440p, but it often trails the RTX 5060 Ti in many modern titles. For content creation, its performance in workloads such as Blender and other OpenCL applications leaves much to be desired, suggesting that the inclusion of AI accelerators may have come at the expense of general-purpose compute capabilities.

That said, the value proposition is not without merit. At an expected price of ₹34,900, the RX 9060 XT presents a reasonably compelling option for mainstream gamers—particularly with AMD’s FSR 4 now showing strong parity with NVIDIA’s DLSS. Still, had AMD opted to equip this GPU with even a modest increase in shader cores, the RX 9060 XT could have been positioned as a much stronger all-round performer.

SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB Graphics Card Key Specs, Price and Launch Date

Release Date:
Market Status:	Launched

Follow Us

Mithun Mohandas

Mithun Mohandas is an Indian technology journalist with 14 years of experience covering consumer technology. He is currently employed at Digit in the capacity of a Managing Editor. Mithun has a background in Computer Engineering and was an active member of the IEEE during his college days. He has a penchant for digging deep into unravelling what makes a device tick. If there's a transistor in it, Mithun's probably going to rip it apart till he finds it. At Digit, he covers processors, graphics cards, storage media, displays and networking devices aside from anything developer related. As an avid PC gamer, he prefers RTS and FPS titles, and can be quite competitive in a race to the finish line. He only gets consoles for the exclusives. He can be seen playing Valorant, World of Tanks, HITMAN and the occasional Age of Empires or being the voice behind hundreds of Digit videos. View Full Profile