A new budget AMD Radeon gaming GPU could take on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050

It looks as though AMD is prepping a new budget gaming GPU that will be cheaper than $299, undercutting the existing Radeon RX 9060 XT. The new AMD Radeon RX 9060, without an XT suffix, has just appeared in the release notes for the latest version of AIDA64, a diagnostics and monitoring software package for PC hardware, suggesting that AMD is planning a new release to counter the recently announced Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050.

While the Radeon RX 9060 XT is now the top recommendation for a budget gaming GPU on our guide to buying the best graphics card, AMD currently doesn't have an offering to counter the new $249 Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050. Given the strong performance of the 9060 XT compared to the RTX 5060, AMD has the potential to cook up a killer product here if it can beat the RTX 5050 for the same price.

Given that this would be a budget graphics card, however, it would be unlikely to have more than 8GB of VRAM, as with the RTX 5050, which will limit its ability to play some games with all their settings turned up, even at relatively low resolutions. You can find out more about this limitation in our RTX 5060 review.

At a guess, I'd say a Radeon RX 9060 is likely to be based on a cut-down version of the same Navi 44 GPU used in the Radeon RX 9060 XT, but perhaps with only 28 compute units enabled, rather than 32, which would give it 1,792 stream processors. That's all conjecture right now, though, as at the moment we can only speculate on what we've seen, which is simply a name.

The latest AIDA64 Extreme release notes for version 7.70.7500 say that the new software now contains "GPU details for AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700, Radeon RX 9060, Radeon RX 9060 XT," with the two GPUs clearly defined separately. What's not known is whether this is a desktop or laptop GPU, or indeed any other details, but it does look as though there's a non-XT variant of the Radeon RX 9060 in the works.

Interestingly, the release notes also state that this update contains "preliminary support for AMD Zen 6 desktop, server and mobile processors," showing that AIDA64 is already gearing up for the next generation of AMD Ryzen CPUs, which are rumored to have very high clock speeds and up to 24 cores.

In the meantime, check out our AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT review to see why the 16GB version of this card is our current top budget GPU buy, as well as our guide to buying the best gaming CPU for your needs.

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