AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT benchmarks leak, look loads faster than predecessor

A couple of AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT benchmarks have just appeared on the Geekbench browser, suggesting that the new gaming GPU is already being tested in advance of reviews. Not only that, but the results imply that the new graphics card is considerably quicker than AMD's last budget gaming GPU, the Radeon RX 7600.

You can still find the Radeon RX 7600 listed on our best GPU guide, thanks to its low price. However, this AMD GPU's days are now looking numbered with the Radeon RX 9060 XT release date on the horizon. In the meantime, though, let's take a look at this benchmark leak and see what the numbers reveal.

We'll start with the OpenCL score, which tests a GPU's ability to run compute code on its stream processors, for general-purpose applications rather than just games. You won't be able to gauge ray tracing power from this test, or the performance of advanced gaming features, but it does give an indication of the basic rendering power under the hood. After all, the more powerful your stream processors, and the more of them you find in the GPU, the faster your graphics card will render your games.

In this case, the leaked Radeon RX 9060 XT OpenCL score is 109,315, while running on an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D test rig with a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master motherboard. According to the listing, the graphics card being tested has 16GB of VRAM and a maximum clock speed of 2,787MHz. Comparatively, the fastest Radeon RX 7600 score with the same CPU is 87,488, suggesting that the new Radeon RX 9060 XT is around 25% quicker in terms of raw shader power.

That's similar to the increase in power between the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and the new RTX 5060, but the difference here is that Nvidia's performance bump mainly comes from adding more CUDA cores. Conversely, the Radeon RX 9060 XT has the same number of stream processors (2,048) as the Radeon RX 7600, meaning this increase in power instead comes from AMD's massively improved RDNA 4 architecture.

Meanwhile, the leaked Radeon RX 9060 XT Vulkan score is 124,251, which is again considerably quicker than the highest score (91,153) achieved by the Radeon RX 7600 with the same CPU, marking a 36% increase in speed. It's hard to translate this all into gaming performance, though. For a start, none of the Radeon RX 7600 test results were obtained on the same test rig as the 9060 XT, but these tests also only really indicate the difference in compute power between GPUs, rather than gaming frame rates.

We'll have to wait and see how this new GPU performs in games when we conduct our own Radeon RX 9060 XT review, but in the meantime, check out my Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 review to see how the competition copes with our current benchmark suite. You can also read my install GPU guide, which takes you through the whole graphics card upgrade process.

You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. In addition, we have a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.