Over the past few months, we've spent a lot of time testing the new 8GB graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, and we've found them to be quite disappointing. There are countless examples where the 16GB versions deliver playable performance – sometimes even high refresh rate performance – while the 8GB models range from significantly slower to completely broken.
While it's true that in all the examples we've shown so far, you can lower visual settings to get the 8GB models working, that's not an ideal way to start using a brand-new purchase. If the situation is already this unstable, it's only going to get worse over the next few years.
Additionally, much of our initial 8GB vs. 16GB testing was conducted on a PCI Express 5.0 system. More recently, we re-tested the 5060 Ti 8GB using PCIe 4.0 and 3.0, and later did the same with the 9060 XT. The Radeon GPU performed much better on the older PCIe standards because it retains all 16 lanes, whereas the GeForce GPU is limited to just 8 lanes.
Today, we're comparing the 8GB versions of the 5060 Ti and 9060 XT under test conditions that exceed 8GB of VRAM to determine which company makes the "best of the worst" 8GB graphics cards in 2025.
The goal is to demonstrate scenarios that go beyond 8GB of VRAM usage, while still allowing playable performance on the 16GB versions of these GPUs. Let's dive into the data.
Benchmarks
F1 25
For testing F1 25, we are using the High preset, which is the third-highest setting in the game. Going any higher completely cripples 8GB GPUs to the point of being unusable, though that is not the case for the 16GB versions.
PCIe 4.0 + PCIe 5.0
Here we are looking at the 8GB versions of the 5060 Ti and 9060 XT. It is interesting to note that when using both PCIe 4.0 and 5.0, the 9060 XT delivered considerably higher 1% lows, almost certainly due to having twice the PCI Express bandwidth.
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