Pros & Cons
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- Major generation-over-generation performance boost
- Highly competitive gaming speeds
- 16GB GDDR6 video memory at an aggressive price
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- No GDDR7 memory
- Mixed results on content creation and AI benchmarks
Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 9060 XT OC 16GB Graphics Card Specs
| Board Power or TDP | 170 |
| Card Length | 9.4 |
| Card Width | double |
| DisplayPort Outputs | 1 |
| GPU Base Clock | 2700 |
| GPU Boost Clock | 3290 |
| Graphics Memory Amount | 16 |
| Graphics Memory Type | GDDR6 |
| Graphics Processor | AMD Navi 44 |
| HDMI Outputs | 2 |
| Number of Fans | 2 |
| Power Connector(s) | 1 8-pin |
AMD hit a powerful stride with its Radeon RX 9000 series of graphics cards, headed by the Radeon RX 9070 XT. Now, the Radeon RX 9060 XT (at a starting price of $349) kicks up the tempo for mainstream PC gamers. Though it faces stern competition in its price range, the RX 9060 XT presents a substantial performance boost over its predecessor, and it emerges as a potent option for gaming at 1080p or 1440p.
We tested a Sapphire Pulse version of the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB that retails for AMD's starting price for this GPU ($349 MSRP), and if you can’t tell yet, we're genuinely happy with its performance and price. Note, however, that we have not yet been able to get our hands on one of Nvidia's competing, just-released $299 GeForce RTX 5060 graphics cards to determine how this AMD card shakes out in our value rankings. As a result, we're withholding our Editors' Choice award in this subcategory of card until we're able to fully test and review the Radeon RX 9060 XT's competition. (There's a fair chance that this AMD card may earn the award after the fact, and we'll update this space soon one way or the other.)
RDNA 4: AMD's Major Mainstream Gaming Makeover
The Radeon RX 9060 XT is an impressive graphics card that illustrates just how much better AMD’s new RDNA 4 graphics architecture is than the outgoing RDNA 3. I’ll cover test scores later, but it should be no surprise that the RX 9060 XT is faster than AMD's equivalent previous-gen Radeon card, the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT. Of course, finding out the RX 9060 XT is, at times, twice as fast is far more surprising.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)We expect new products to be better than their predecessors, but gen-over-gen jumps in performance this big are rare. What makes this more surprising is the similarities in specs between the Radeon RX 9060 XT and the RX 7600 XT. Both have 2,048 stream processors, 128 texture mapping units (TMUs), 64 raster operation processors (ROPs), 32 ray tracing (RT) cores, and 32 AI accelerators. They also have in common a 128-bit memory interface for GDDR6 RAM.
On paper, this makes the Radeon RX 9060 XT and the RX 7600 XT look nearly identical. However, looking at the other numbers in our spec chart, you may spot a few other significant differences. A computer chip's transistor count can often be quite telling about its capabilities, and while in most ways the RX 9060 XT and the RX 7600 XT are similar, the new card has a far higher transistor count—more than double, in fact.
This transistor disparity reveals that the Radeon RX 9060 XT is a much more complicated chip design than the RX 7600 XT, and the benchmarks back that up. Typically, you’d also expect a chip with such a higher transistor count to be larger, more power hungry, and likely hotter-running, but none of those seems true here. The RX 9060 XT’s graphics chip is not only far more advanced than the one on the RX 7600 XT, but it’s also smaller, uses less power, and runs cooler.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Not yet done, the Radeon RX 9060 XT also has higher boost clock speeds than its predecessor by around 400MHz. Part of the RX 9060 XT’s advantages unquestionably come from TSMC’s N4P 4nm manufacturing process, superior to the 6nm TSMC process used for all RX 7000-series GPUs.
We don’t see much change versus the Radeon RX 7600 XT in the memory department. The RX 7600 XT’s least appealing feature was its narrow 128-bit memory interface, and the RX 9060 XT retains this feature along with all its limitations. Faster GDDR6 RAM on the RX 9060 XT, which nets an 11% increase in memory bandwidth, helps alleviate the issue somewhat. That helps some, but nowhere near as much as GDDR7 would, which is what Nvidia's competing GeForce RTX 5060 and GeForce RTX 5060 Ti use.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Our review sample came with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, but models with 8GB of RAM will also be available. The 8GB model of the RX 9060 XT costs a bit less, at $299, compared with $349 for the 16GB model. I can't definitively say whether the extra RAM is worth it at this time, but extra RAM does help to give you peace of mind.
The Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB in Detail
Our Sapphire Radeon RX 9060 XT review card has a slight factory overclock, taking the boost clock from 3,130MHz to 3,290MHz. The card's almost all-black exterior is decorated with contrasting red lines and shiny silver in spots, giving it an overall edgy industrial look. This model also has just two fans and measures 9.4 inches in length, making it shorter than most triple-fan GPUs and easier to fit into tight cases.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)This Pulse card's rear I/O panel is one of the more basic ones I have seen in recent years. Modern graphics cards almost always have four video connections, and more DisplayPorts than HDMIs. But this one has just two HDMI ports and one DisplayPort connection. The card requires just a single 8-pin PCIe power connection to the power supply.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Test Setup and Competition
We built the graphics-card test bed we currently use in 2025 with a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master motherboard and an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processor. A 360mm Cooler Master liquid cooler keeps the processor from overheating during testing. The system has 16GB of DDR5 RAM set to 6,000MHz in a dual-channel configuration and two 2TB Crucial PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs. A 1,500-watt Corsair power supply powers the whole testbed, and we conduct all tests using the latest version of Windows 11 available.
The Radeon RX 9060 XT exists in a hotly contested segment of the graphics card market. Nvidia recently released its GeForce RTX 5060 for $299, competing directly with the 8GB Radeon RX 9060 XT. (We haven't tested the RTX 5060 yet.) The 16GB RX 9060 XT has a little breathing room at $349, but not much, because the 8GB GeForce RTX 5060 Ti costs $379. Then you have the 16GB RTX 5060 Ti at $429 if you have extra room in your budget. Technically, some last-generation cards, like the Radeon RX 7600 XT and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, also occupy this space. However, those aren’t genuine options at their MSRPs now that the new generation of graphics cards is here.
Synthetic Benchmarks
The Radeon RX 9060 XT performed well in the synthetic benchmarks overall. While it stayed behind the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti in most tests, it far surpassed its predecessor and rivaled the more expensive RX 7800 XT and the RX 7700 XT while also handily beating the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti in most tests.
Unigine’s Superposition test saw the RX 9060 XT fall behind the RTX 5060 Ti but ahead of the RTX 4060 Ti. AMD's RX 9060 XT notably kept pace with Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti in the screen optimization benchmark.
Procyon AI Benchmarks
AI benchmarking is still in its early stages, but UL’s Procyon AI test clarified that Nvidia has the upper hand in this area. The Radeon RX 9060 XT performed well enough against the AMD competition, but it didn't distinguish itself here otherwise.
Sometimes the last-gen AMD cards showed a little more AI performance than the new Radeon RX 9060 XT, but there's no question which company you should buy a graphics card from if you are strongly interested in AI performance.
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Content Creation Benchmarks
Modern graphics cards are commonly used for content creation tasks these days, and how well they perform in that capacity can be a key selling point. Overall, the Radeon RX 9060 XT performed well in our Adobe Premiere Pro 24 benchmark test (run via the PugetBench utility). It improved significantly over its predecessor and performed as well at this task as the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti.
The results we got from the Blender benchmark are likely best ignored. I considered removing that chart from this review, but realized it illustrates a different, equally important point about software optimization. While graphics cards are valuable tools for content creation, the software must be optimized for your hardware. Blender just doesn’t seem to be optimized to run on AMD graphics cards.
We don’t have scores for the Radeon RX 9070 or the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT for this test either, as both refused to run the benchmark. The Radeon RX 9060 XT completed the benchmark test but performed slower than its predecessor, which doesn’t make much sense given its advantages. None of the AMD cards performed well in this test, while Nvidia’s cards showed a clear advantage.
Screen Optimization Benchmarks
Black Myth: Wukong makes screen optimization technologies like AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS, mandatory, so we tested each card here with their respective tools. This arrangement isn’t ideal from a performance comparison perspective, with differences in image quality and latency from using these technologies making it imprecise to compare them against each other. As each company has some form of this technology, however, it does help to get some idea of how they compare in terms of performance in at least one game.
Starting with frame generation off, the Radeon RX 9060 XT performed well against its last-gen competitors. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 was clearly behind, as was the RX 7600 XT. The RX 9060 XT also came into a near tie with the RTX 4060 Ti and the RX 7700 XT, both of which cost a fair bit more. However, the RTX 5060 Ti was significantly faster than the RX 9060 XT.
Enabling frame generation gave the AMD graphics cards a larger performance bump than it did for Nvidia. Nothing changed regarding how the AMD cards stand against each other, but the RX 9060 XT now clearly pulled ahead of the RTX 4060 Ti and ended on par with the RTX 5060 Ti at 1080p and 1440p. At 4K, the RX 9060 XT’s lack of memory bandwidth started to hold it back.
Ray-Traced Gaming Benchmarks
AMD Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards feature ray-tracing hardware, but their ray-tracing performance was clearly behind the competition. That’s why AMD made improving ray tracing performance a primary design goal while working on the Radeon RX 9000-series, and it shows. The RX 9060 XT outpaced all of the last-gen AMD graphics cards we included in the chart in Cyberpunk 2077. It also tied with the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti in this game, while it lagged slightly behind the RTX 5060 Ti.
In F1 2024, the Radeon RX 9060 XT continued outperforming the RX 7000 series, including the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, which initially retailed for $499. The RX 9060 XT also did a better job competing against the Nvidia competition in F1 2024, where it nearly tied the RTX 5060 Ti at 4K and was only slightly behind at 1440p and 1080p. Far Cry 6 also showed the Radeon RX 9060 XT and the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti in a near tie at all resolutions.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora presented a different view of the lineup based on the test scores. The Radeon RX 7800 XT pulled ahead of the RX 9060 XT here, and the RX 7700 XT pulled into a tie with the RX 9060 XT. The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti was notably faster here, too, while the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti was also a few steps ahead of the RX 9060 XT at all resolutions.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III also showed a starkly different picture, with the Radeon RX 9060 XT beating the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti for the first time and with a sizable lead. This test also showed the Radeon RX 7800 XT to be faster than the Radeon RX 9060 XT.
Finally, Returnal presents a similar outlook to the Avatar game, with the RX 9060 XT a notable step behind the RTX 5060 Ti and the RX 7800 XT. At least the 9060 XT still outpaced the RX 7700 XT, and it was a little behind the RTX 4060 Ti at 1080p but pulled ahead at 1440p and 4K.
Traditional Gaming Benchmarks
The Radeon RX 7000 series may have had underpowered ray-tracing hardware, but its performance in games that didn’t support ray tracing was and still is excellent. The RX 9060 XT can’t quite match AMD's RX 7800 XT or the RX 7700 XT here, but it’s still a significant step up from the Radeon RX 7600 XT. The GeForce RTX 5060 Ti also showed a substantial lead over the RX 9060 XT here, but the RTX 4060 Ti was clearly behind the RX 9060 XT in turn.
The Radeon RX 9060 XT also held that advantage over the RTX 4060 Ti in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, though it couldn’t match the RTX 5060 Ti here either. It came into a near tie with the RX 7700 XT and once again far surpassed the Radeon RX 7600 XT.
Power and Thermal Benchmarks
Testing the power consumption of the graphics card testbed using a Kill-A-Watt monitor gives us some insight into each graphics card's power demands. For content creation tasks, the Radeon RX 9060 XT used less power than the other AMD graphics cards, though its worse performance in Blender means it likely performed less efficiently here.
While gaming, power consumption was excellent, with the RX 9060 XT using less power than all of the other AMD cards tested, including the RX 7600 XT, which the RX 9060 XT ran circles around. The RX 9060 XT also used less power than the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, though it wasn’t quite as lean-running as the RTX 4060 Ti.
Sapphire’s thermal solution kept temperatures well-managed on the Radeon RX 9060 XT. Temperature management is one of the few places where the Radeon RX 9060 XT clearly has the upper hand against the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, though this could be partially due to the thermal solution used on the PNY model of the RTX 5060 Ti that we reviewed, compared with Sapphire's.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB
In our tests, AMD's Radeon RX 9060 XT delivers one of the largest generational performance leaps in 2025's crop of graphics cards. Its potent frame rates across many game types and 16GB of memory make this GPU a sweet, popularly priced deal for 1080p and light 1440p play.