As you may have already seen, AMD officially showcased its upcoming Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT earlier this week, including pricing details that were an extremely welcome sight. Now, I’m starting to wonder about the Radeon RX 9060 – a GPU that, if priced correctly, could be an extremely attractive value proposition for PC gamers.
Naturally, I’m not going to get too excited until we see some real-world performance figures for the new AMD cards. Team Red made some bold claims in its RX 9070 XT performance showcase, placing the GPU just slightly above the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti in terms of native 4K gaming performance despite it being $150 cheaper (and let’s be honest, you can’t get a 5070 Ti at retail price right now anyway).
I suspect that’s a load of baloney, since AMD used an overclocked RX 9070 XT for their testing and their comparison 5070 Ti was most likely fished out of a crypto miner’s dumpster and then spat on for good measure (AMD: this is a joke, please don’t sue me). AMD also only showcased raw native 4K framerates, while Nvidia is keen to push the effectiveness of its new DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation features, which – for all the debate surrounding them – do significantly improve your in-game fps.
Still, it’s very impressive stuff – but at $549 (around £520 / AU$880), even the non-XT version of the RX 9070 can’t exactly be called a budget GPU. It’s more of a midrange card, and while it looks like a great midrange card, I’d still argue that the best choice right now for PC builders on a budget is the Intel Arc B580, which scored a rare five stars in our review for its solid 1440p gaming performance and extremely reasonable $249.99 / £249.99 / AU$449 price tag.
Figuring it out
So, as things stand right now, it looks like AMD might be taking the midrange GPU space by storm, while Intel holds onto the budget market and Nvidia remains the undisputed king of the high-end. But with more RX 9000-series cards yet to come, it’s entirely possible that AMD could descend on Intel with some fiery (but affordable) wrath – after all, AMD made it clear last year that it would no longer be targeting the premium space, with a greater focus on midrange and budget GPUs.
So, the RX 9060. We know very little about it right now, but we can make some reasonable extrapolations about it based on previous leaks and our existing knowledge of the RX 9070 cards.
For starters, some leaks from back in December proved to be mostly accurate regarding the 9070 and 9070 XT, correctly predicting the name change from RX 8000 and the upgrade to RDNA 4 as well as AMD’s new FSR 4 upscaling tech. Those leaks claimed that pricing for the two new GPUs would be in the $449 to $649 range, which has also proven accurate, although it was admittedly a fairly wide net being cast there. The same leaker claimed that upcoming Navi 44 GPUs (the 9070 cards are Navi 48) would sit in the $179 to $349 price range, presumably with the RX 9060 XT – or perhaps just a plain old RX 9060 – at the top.
This is where I start to doubt the leaks a little; a price of $349 would be a $200 gap between that card and the RX 9060, which feels like a fairly wide spacing when it comes to pricing. $399 feels a bit more reasonable to me, especially if we do get an RX 9060 XT – and as PC Gamer reports, we can apparently expect “multiple RX 9060 products” to land in the second quarter of 2025.
Performance without the price
But if the leaks are accurate and AMD does produce an RX 9060 XT for $349 or less in a few months’ time, I’ll absolutely lose my merde (pardon my French). The Radeon RX 7600 XT was a decent enough GPU, but it failed to measure up to Nvidia’s competing RTX 4060 when it came to bang for your buck.
AMD looks to be making major strides in that department, though. Even if the RX 9070 XT is 10% behind the RTX 5070 Ti in terms of raw performance – and I suspect the average might be a lot closer than that – it’s a full 20% cheaper, and there’s still no sign of a desktop RTX 5060 from Nvidia. While I do imagine that card will eventually surface, AMD has the gloves off in the affordable GPU arena right now – and there’s frankly not a hope in hell we’ll see a desktop RTX 5050, so anything below that performance level that AMD decides to offer could absolutely dominate that price point. Yes, I know Intel’s new budget GPUs are good. No, I don’t think they’ll outclass new Radeon cards.
The fact is that AMD has had skin in the budget game for a long time. My partner, who admittedly mostly plays Stardew Valley, is still rocking a Radeon RX 570 that runs perfectly well for 1080p gaming – a graphics card that retailed at just $179 in the US when it was released back in 2017. I’ve offered to replace it with something a bit more current, but he says “Why? It still works fine.”
The affordable to midrange space is where Team Red excels, and after some small missteps in the previous desktop generation, I reckon it’s ready to take back its crown. With Nvidia focused on AI and ridiculously high performance GPUs, there’s no time like the present.
