AMD's new graphics card is way more entry-level than expected

AMD has launched a new graphics card, the RX 9050. This is an entry-level graphics card with a slim provision of cores and VRAM, more of a match for the 890M than the RX 9060. It’s even more entry-level than initial rumours suggested, and while you’d hope for a great price to match, we’re not getting our hopes up yet.

Take a look at the specifications below, right from AMD’s website, and you’ll get an idea of the card. It’s using the same Navi 44 GPU as the more capable entry-level and mid-range graphics cards, but it’s been trimmed down to within an inch of its life. At 1,024 cores, it is actually a match for the 890M GPU found in Strix Point mobile chips, though it does have the big benefit of a desktop power budget, even if only 92 watts; RDNA 4 architecture, and 32 MB of Infinity Cache.

Swipe to scroll horizontally

RX 9050 specs
Row 0 – Cell 0	RX 9050	RX 9060
GPU	Navi 44	Navi 44
Architecture	RDNA 4	RDNA 4
Compute Units (CUs)	16	28
Cores	1024	1792
Boost clock	2600	2990
Game clock	1920	2400
ROPs	64	64
Ray Accelerators	16	28
AI Accelerators	32	56
FP32 TFLOPs	10.6	21.4
Transistors	29.7	29.7
Memory capacity (GB)	8/4*	8
Memory speed (Gbps)	18	18
Memory type	GDDR6	GDDR6
Memory interface	128-bit	128-bit
Memory bandwidth (GB/s)	288	288
Infinity Cache (MB)	32	32
Typical Board Power (W)	92	132
Minimum PSU (W)	450	450
Row 20 – Cell 0	*not confirmed	Row 20 – Cell 2

Compared to previous rumours, which my colleague Jacob Fox called “quite strange” when we published a story about them in May, it’s a lot less capable than expected. Look to the TFLOPs for a more holistic view of what’s going on, and the RX 9050 is actually rated to half the performance of the RX 9060. Bear in mind, TFLOPs does not directly correlate to game performance, but it’s a general idea of what to expect.

It’s tough to judge a graphics card without knowing the price. ASRock is the only partner to announce availability for the RX 9050, launching its own RX 9050 Challenger 8 GB card. There’s no clear price for the card yet and it’s set to launch only in LATAM and Asia Pacific.

The card may end up being more OEM-only elsewhere. The RX 9060 is OEM-only. Only Best Buy has the card for sale so far, inside a CyberPower gaming PC for $890. This includes an RX 9050 4 GB among its shoestring specification.

Yeah, 4 GB.

What’s that about? The AMD website only lists an 8 GB model, though that listing is only talking about a “Max Memory Size” of 8 GB, while earlier rumours had suggested a 4 GB model would be part of the range. ASRock also only talks about an 8 GB model.

(Image credit: AMD)

So is this CyberPower listing incorrect? I’d love to think so, but it may well be the case that there’s an even slimmer 4 GB model for OEMs. If that’s the case, it’s no surprise then that AMD isn’t shouting about it to the world. That’s a pitiful amount of memory for 2026—AMD actually rallied against 4 GB cards back in 2022.

“Competitive products at a similar entry level price-point are offering up to a maximum of 4GB of VRAM, which is evidently not enough for today’s games,” AMD said in a blog post. “Go Beyond 4GB of Video Memory to Crank Up your settings. Play on Radeon RX Series GPUs with 6GB or 8GB of VRAM and enjoy gaming at Max settings.”

Let’s just hope this 4 GB thing is a typo and any plans to release such a card have been brushed aside.

With the RDNA 4 architecture under the hood, the RX 9060 will at least have some benefits over older cards. The full FSR Redstone feature set is supported by RDNA 4, including Frame Generation and Ray Regeneration. Though we tend to find frame generation works best when the card is able to deliver a good amount of frames to begin with, which this card may struggle to do in the latest games. At least FSR 4 is natively supported, including FP8. This card might need it.