On store shelves, AMD's Radeon RX 9060 XT looks like a compelling option for gamers. It's affordable, backed by a trusted brand, and appears well-equipped for modern gaming. But there's a catch: the 8GB version is severely constrained by its limited video memory – a technical bottleneck that may not show up in standard benchmarks. That missing memory turns the 8GB model into a ticking time bomb for gamers hoping to future-proof their rigs.
The 8GB RX 9060 XT is marketed under the same name as the 16GB model, yet performance-wise, they tell very different stories. In our review, we highlighted several modern games with rising VRAM demands where the 8GB version didn't just struggle – it broke.
Frame rates tanked. Texture streaming stuttered. What should have been smooth gameplay at reasonable settings became a frustrating experience. This is problematic for several reasons, but most importantly, a brand-new graphics card should not be bottlenecked by limited VRAM in today's titles – and yet, here we are.
This becomes a major concern when you consider that most buyers expect to keep their GPU for at least three to four years. And if 8GB is already falling short in 2025, the road ahead looks even rougher.
The Future of VRAM Usage
In those 3 to 4 years, games will almost certainly become more demanding, requiring significantly more VRAM than they do today. Developers are already sounding the alarm. Even now, optimizing games for 8GB GPUs is becoming a time-consuming hurdle – a problem many in the gaming community flagged well before it showed up in review metrics. Some developers have spent weeks, even months, building workarounds just to make games functional on 8GB cards, only to see players expect next-gen experiences on last-gen memory footprints.
Testing VRAM limitations can be difficult, and in many cases, a quick 30- to 60-second benchmark run won't reveal the performance issues players encounter during extended gaming sessions.
For example, to see VRAM-related performance issues in Halo Infinite on an 8GB GPU using ultra settings at 1080p or 1440p, you generally have to play the game for a prolonged period. It takes time to overwhelm the VRAM buffer. Texture issues, however, tend to appear more quickly, but you have to be looking for them – and they won't show up in benchmark graphs.
Another factor reviewers often overlook is hardware configuration. When testing GPUs, it's standard practice to pair them with the latest and fastest CPUs to showcase their full potential, and that's exactly what we do.
But when it comes to VRAM limitations, testing on a high-end CPU with fast memory and a modern platform represents a best-case scenario for pushing the VRAM buffer. We briefly demonstrated this in our RX 9060 XT 8GB review by running tests on a Core i7-8700K, a processor limited to PCI Express 3.0 and slower DDR4 memory – and the results were shocking.
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