GoKawiilAMD announced its latest RDNA 4-based budget GPU in late July, the Radeon RX 9050, with a suggested price of $280. Oddly, despite receiving an MSRP in dollars, it wasn't actually intended for retail sale in the US. But that's the least strange thing about this GPU. In this review we're testing the cut-down 4GB version hiding inside prebuilt PCs, and (spoiler) it's considerably worse than the RX 9050 most buyers will find when they research the card.
Getting one wasn't easy, either. It cost us about $1,700 Australian dollars to get our hands on this entry-level GPU because you can't buy it in Australia, and where the 4GB model is available, it isn't sold on its own. It's an OEM-only product, and as we'll see, a particularly dodgy one.
You can currently purchase the 8GB RX 9050 as a standalone retail product in several regions. In Japan, for example, it can be found for around 54,000 yen. A direct currency conversion puts that at roughly $345, while Intel's Arc B570 can be had for around 42,000 yen, or approximately $270.
The Real Problem: 4GB and Half the Bandwidth
But that's the retail 8GB RX 9050. Unfortunately, two very different GPUs share the exact same name, somewhat like the RX 9060 XT, which is available with either 8GB or 16GB of VRAM. As questionable as that naming scheme is, the RX 9050 situation is even worse.
That's because the particularly nasty 4GB version can only be sold as an OEM product under AMD's rules, meaning it can only be offered as part of a prebuilt computer. That's how we got ours. We purchased CyberPowerPC's "Gamer Master Gaming Desktop" from Best Buy for $750.
The PC is advertised as including "AMD Radeon RX 9050 graphics," but if you look closely at the specifications, you'll notice that it only has 4GB of GDDR6 dedicated video memory, assuming the person buying the system even knows what that means.
To state the obvious, this version has just 4GB of VRAM, while every retail RX 9050 we've seen comes with 8GB. That's a problem because anyone researching the Radeon RX 9050 is almost guaranteed to find information about the faster 8GB model. In fact, if you visit AMD's official product page, that's the one you'll find.
A buyer doing their due diligence might check whether the RX 9050 can handle the games they want to play. AMD's own performance data suggests around 60 fps in 007: First Light, almost 100 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 using medium settings, and 206 fps in Rainbow Six Siege. That all sounds pretty good for a budget graphics card. Unfortunately, if you buy a system equipped with the 4GB version, you'll be looking at significantly lower performance than those figures suggest.
AMD's Radeon RX 9050 product page
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