GoKawiilWe promised we would get one, and while it's not the 4GB model, which will require a little more time, we do have AMD's brand-new Radeon RX 9050 8GB. And boy, is this thing super-duper stinky. It's really, really slow and represents very poor value, but you'll want to see just how bad it is. This card is special, we promise.
We can't even reveal which Radeon RX 9050 8GB model we have, so we're unable to show it. AMD wouldn't provide us with a review sample, and none of its partners were permitted to send us one, meaning we had to rely on some of our side-channel contacts. Oddly, while the RX 9050 is available at retail in Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Japan, Australia and Korea have been excluded.
This is a different Radeon graphics card from a previous TechSpot review, only shown for illustrative purposes.
We wouldn't be shocked if AMD excluded Australia just to dodge us, but we could almost understand it given how brutally we mugged the Radeon RX 6500 XT. We're mostly joking, of course. We don't seriously believe AMD excluded an entire continent just to prevent us from reviewing the RX 9050, but if it did, the joke is on them. So, what exactly is the RX 9050, and why are you getting the sense that we might not like it?
There are three key issues with the RX 9050. First, performance is really bad. That problem is compounded by the price: at $280, it's far too expensive for the performance on offer. Worst of all, it shares its exact product name with a broken 4GB version that packs not only half the VRAM, but also half the memory bandwidth. It's a real doozy.
This is a different Radeon graphics card from a previous TechSpot review, only shown for illustrative purposes.
In short, the Radeon RX 9050 is a heavily cut-down 9060 XT. Apparently, AMD has quite a few defective RX 9060 XT dies that couldn't even be repurposed for the RX 9060. Whereas the RX 9060 XT requires 2,048 functioning cores and the vanilla RX 9060 uses 1,792, the RX 9050 features just 1,024. Despite using the same silicon as the RX 9060 XT, the RX 9050 has only half as many active cores.
Radeon 9050 4GB Radeon 9050 8GB Radeon 9060 Radeon 9060 XT Price (MSRP) OEM $280 OEM $300 Release Date July 28, 2026 Aug 5, 2025 Jun 5, 2025 Process TSMC N4P Transistors 29.7 billion Die Size (mm2) 199 mm2 Core Config 1024 / 64 / 64 1792 / 112 / 64 2048 / 128 / 64 GPU Boost Clock 2600 MHz 2990 MHz 3130 MHz Memory Capacity 4 GB 8 GB Memory Speed 18 Gbps 20 Gbps Memory Type GDDR6 Bus Type / Bandwidth 64-bit : 144 GB/s 128-bit : 288 GB/s 128-bit : 288 GB/s 128-bit : 320 GB/s Total Board Power 92W 132W 150W
According to AMD's reference spec, the RX 9050 cores also clock as high as just 2.6 GHz, whereas the RX 9060 XT can reach 3.1 GHz. Our model operated between 2.7 and 2.8 GHz, which is still lower than the RX 9060 XT.
Given all of that, we'd expect the RX 9050 to be around 50% slower than the RX 9060 XT. That could leave it struggling to compete with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5050. It's hard to imagine that being the case, but based on the specifications, it certainly appears possible. With that, let's examine operating behavior before moving on to the benchmarks.
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