WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.760 At AMD, we believe in supporting transparent, independent coverage that helps customers 00:00:06.760 --> 00:00:10.360 make informed decisions. Ah, do you then? 00:00:10.360 --> 00:00:15.720 Well then, why the HE Double Hockey Sticks didn't you want to send us an 8Gig version 00:00:15.720 --> 00:00:21.960 of the 9060XT? Oh, it was based on regional market demand. 00:00:21.960 --> 00:00:28.300 Well, the last time I checked, we have a global audience, so unless there's no demand for 00:00:28.300 --> 00:00:33.660 a review in the region of Earth, I don't really get that explanation. 00:00:33.660 --> 00:00:38.980 No, the more likely reason is that you were afraid that we would roast your 5060 competitor 00:00:38.980 --> 00:00:43.940 as hard as we roasted the 5060, so you put off sending it until we wouldn't have time 00:00:43.940 --> 00:00:48.300 to test it before the embargo. But we can talk more about your shenanigans later. 00:00:48.300 --> 00:00:55.140 First, the 9060XT 16Gig promises to be the best value card with a 60 in the name in about 00:00:55.140 --> 00:01:02.300 half a decade. We're matching the 5060Ti 8Gig in performance, outdoing it with double the VRAM and beating 00:01:02.300 --> 00:01:09.380 it on price, which sounds great, but it also might not be the right thing to buy. 00:01:09.380 --> 00:01:15.980 And I'll tell you why after I tell you something you do want to buy from our sponsor. 00:01:15.980 --> 00:01:29.020 1080p is both the most popular gaming resolution today and the most popular excuse for shipping 00:01:29.020 --> 00:01:35.460 knee-capped 8Gig cards, like the 8Gig RTX 5060, which we purchased for this review since 00:01:35.460 --> 00:01:39.460 NVIDIA really doesn't seem to want reviewers testing those. 00:01:39.460 --> 00:01:45.140 But with all that said, the truth is, if you are playing games at 1080, AMD and NVIDIA are 00:01:45.140 --> 00:01:50.340 probably right, it is enough for now. 00:01:50.340 --> 00:01:56.000 But remember guys, this is the minimum spec for new AAA titles, and these are cards that 00:01:56.000 --> 00:01:59.100 cost $300 plus. 00:01:59.100 --> 00:02:06.780 Anywho, across our suite of games that exist today, the 9060XT performs admirably, but not 00:02:06.780 --> 00:02:12.860 spectacularly, keeping up with the 5060Ti cards which cost at least $30 more and discerting 00:02:12.860 --> 00:02:17.140 a commanding lead over the anemic 5060 non-Ti. 00:02:17.140 --> 00:02:22.660 It outperforms its last-gen counterpart, the 7600XT, by more than 30% most of the time, 00:02:22.660 --> 00:02:27.460 which is enough to highlight how truly awful that card was, but not enough to make the 00:02:27.460 --> 00:02:33.780 Intel Arc B580 look like a bad value, Intel's really standing out with their battlemage architecture. 00:02:33.780 --> 00:02:39.180 Of course, we would have loved to give you guys 8Gig numbers, so this is merely conjecture, 00:02:39.180 --> 00:02:44.420 but at 1080p raster, you can expect pretty much identical performance numbers because 00:02:44.420 --> 00:02:48.220 it's essentially the same card, sans half of the memory. 00:02:48.220 --> 00:02:54.580 If we find time to throw one on the bench, we will have that linked at LTT Labs down below. 00:02:54.580 --> 00:02:59.260 Okay, so what about the value proposition? 00:02:59.260 --> 00:03:05.140 Well, that depends. See, the 9060XT actually comes in three variants. 00:03:05.140 --> 00:03:10.960 The 8Gig one that didn't arrive on time, the base-clocked 16GB model, and the OC variant 00:03:10.960 --> 00:03:19.540 from Sapphire that was sent to us. This one has higher power draw and boosted clocks compared to 16GB non-OC cards, but 00:03:19.540 --> 00:03:25.740 other than that, all of the variants are built on the exact same Navi 44 GPU based on AMD's 00:03:25.740 --> 00:03:33.140 RDNA4 architecture. This new architecture brings a bunch of improvements that you can get a deep dive into in our 9070 00:03:33.140 --> 00:03:36.180 series review, but here's the short version. 00:03:36.180 --> 00:03:41.180 Big improvements in ray tracing and AI that bring these cards up to speed, almost with 00:03:41.180 --> 00:03:45.980 NVIDIA in non-traditional forms of rendering, and a host of other improvements that allow 00:03:45.980 --> 00:03:49.620 them to sometimes even beat NVIDIA in traditional raster. 00:03:49.620 --> 00:03:55.140 Despite its similar-sounding name, though, these new GPUs are substantially cut down 00:03:55.140 --> 00:04:00.780 compared to their bigger brothers, with about half as many compute units as the 9070XT. 00:04:00.780 --> 00:04:06.380 Interestingly they did this, which means we have half the memory bus width, but benefit 00:04:06.380 --> 00:04:11.980 from keeping the same IO and 16 PCIe Gen 5 lanes. 00:04:11.980 --> 00:04:16.620 That last point is key for gamers who are holding on to older systems where a buy-aid 00:04:16.620 --> 00:04:22.100 interface like on some of NVIDIA and Intel's cards can result in a measurable performance 00:04:22.100 --> 00:04:26.180 loss. Oh, there is one thing I lied about on the IO. 00:04:26.180 --> 00:04:29.900 Interestingly, this card only has three display outputs. 00:04:30.100 --> 00:04:34.380 Most of you declared this to be a non-issue after the announcement, but it is the first 00:04:34.380 --> 00:04:39.580 time that I've seen a $300 card in years that didn't have four outputs. 00:04:39.580 --> 00:04:44.300 I digress, though. To compensate for the cut-down die, AMD bumped up the clock speed so that you'll get a bit 00:04:44.300 --> 00:04:49.580 more than literally half of the performance of the 9070XT, which is also why the card 00:04:49.580 --> 00:04:56.180 draws a bit over half the power, in line with the 5060TI 8G that AMD positions it against. 00:04:56.180 --> 00:05:02.660 And in combuster, our card seems to be right in line with the 5060TI 8G, but interestingly, 00:05:02.660 --> 00:05:05.900 the story is a bit different in F124. 00:05:05.900 --> 00:05:14.860 In this racing game, AMD's latest pulls an average 174W with a maximum spike of 225W. 00:05:14.860 --> 00:05:20.780 By comparison, the 5060TI 8G averages around 121W. 00:05:20.780 --> 00:05:24.420 We don't know if this behavior will show up in every game, but this is enough for us 00:05:24.500 --> 00:05:30.780 to recommend going for a slightly beefier power supply than the 450W unit that AMD recommends. 00:05:30.780 --> 00:05:35.500 Thankfully, this is still relatively low power draw, meaning that these cards are pretty 00:05:35.500 --> 00:05:40.820 easy to tame, and even loaded by a power virus like combuster, our cards stay both cool 00:05:40.820 --> 00:05:44.180 and quiet. Let's talk 1440P gaming. 00:05:44.180 --> 00:05:51.140 AMD claimed 6% better gaming performance than the 5060TI 8G at 1440, but looking at our 00:05:51.140 --> 00:05:54.700 raster results, we just don't see it. 00:05:54.700 --> 00:06:00.180 They score a couple of wins in LNWake 2 and Last of Us Part 1, but is it really that impressive 00:06:00.180 --> 00:06:05.700 of a win when NVIDIA's 8G cards can't complete the test and you just didn't submit your 00:06:05.700 --> 00:06:15.460 8G card on time for testing? Especially when we factor in that the 9060XT 16G trails behind the 5060TIs and honestly 00:06:15.460 --> 00:06:20.580 doesn't even look that stellar against the 5060 in the remainder of our games here. 00:06:20.620 --> 00:06:24.740 If you're wondering, by the way, about how the 5070 compares to all of this, we didn't 00:06:24.740 --> 00:06:29.380 retest that card for this review, so we didn't want to include stale numbers, but it's a 00:06:29.380 --> 00:06:33.140 little worse than the 9070 non-XT from back when we reviewed that. 00:06:33.140 --> 00:06:40.340 Moving on to ray tracing. Despite the massive leap in RT performance that came with RDNA4, AMD is still unable 00:06:40.340 --> 00:06:49.580 to match their direct NVIDIA competitors. In 1080P RT, the 9060XT falls well behind the 5060TI 8G in our suite of tests, which 00:06:49.580 --> 00:06:55.140 is sad, but what really jumped off the charts to me is NVIDIA's embarrassing loss here 00:06:55.140 --> 00:07:00.260 with the 5060 not even able to keep up with the 4060TI. 00:07:00.260 --> 00:07:03.380 I thought they had improved the ray tracing on Blackwell. 00:07:03.380 --> 00:07:10.060 What the heck happened? And in 1440P RT Cyberpunk, things don't look much better. 00:07:10.060 --> 00:07:14.660 Maybe we can find a happier story in productivity? No, not really. 00:07:14.660 --> 00:07:19.700 I mean, the nice thing about having 16 gigs of memory, if you do, is that it allows you 00:07:19.700 --> 00:07:26.940 to dip your toes into AI without being as limited. I mean, look at how all the 8Gig cards fumble as we load up a larger model. 00:07:26.940 --> 00:07:31.740 But even with 16 gigs, AMD isn't even close to NVIDIA in terms of performance in our machine 00:07:31.740 --> 00:07:36.580 learning tests. It turns out, haha, software support is important. 00:07:36.580 --> 00:07:40.300 And that only becomes more clear as we move beyond AI to Blender. 00:07:40.300 --> 00:07:45.540 This goes brrrrrrr and HIP goes brrrrrrrrr. 00:07:45.540 --> 00:07:49.860 Adjusting focus to content creation, though, we see big improvements genover gen from AMD 00:07:49.860 --> 00:07:54.140 and they even beat NVIDIA in DaVinci Resolve, though they trailed behind in the more popular 00:07:54.140 --> 00:07:58.400 Premiere Pro benchmark. Alright, well that's the performance. 00:07:58.400 --> 00:08:01.740 So this has been a big load of meh so far. 00:08:01.740 --> 00:08:08.280 But hey, getting 16 gigs of VRAM and 5060TI-ish performance for a theoretical $30 discount? 00:08:08.280 --> 00:08:15.560 That's something. It's just, it's tough to justify the $50 jump over the 5060, whose price is tough to justify 00:08:15.560 --> 00:08:23.640 over a kick in the groin. I mean, to AMD's credit here, FSR4 has made huge strides, meaning that other than multi-frame 00:08:23.640 --> 00:08:29.480 gen, which a lot of you aren't that into, AMD has near parity on most of the features 00:08:29.480 --> 00:08:34.560 that gamers care about. Even their video encoder is almost as good as NVENC these days. 00:08:34.560 --> 00:08:39.440 They just need to work on third-party support for all of this stuff. 00:08:39.440 --> 00:08:44.960 So at the end of the day then, I don't know, I'm left kind of frustrated. 00:08:44.960 --> 00:08:49.720 In recent years, AMD has slowly but surely caught up to NVIDIA in terms of performance 00:08:49.720 --> 00:08:54.280 and features, but they've also caught up in terms of their crappy behavior. 00:08:54.280 --> 00:09:01.600 Last gen, the 7600XT had 16 gigs and the 7600 non-XT had 8 gigs of VRAM. 00:09:01.640 --> 00:09:05.720 It was super easy to tell what you were buying from the name of the product. 00:09:05.720 --> 00:09:10.440 This time around, they've lumped both cards together with the sameXT name, and then at 00:09:10.440 --> 00:09:15.480 the same time, as far as we can tell, intentionally made it more difficult for media to review 00:09:15.480 --> 00:09:19.280 the 8 gig version, which could lead to consumer confusion. 00:09:19.280 --> 00:09:25.280 So AMD, your commitment to the press words, kind of meaningless at this point. 00:09:25.280 --> 00:09:29.560 And speaking of meaningless promises, you still haven't managed to get your previous 00:09:29.560 --> 00:09:34.480 cards into the sales channel anywhere near MSRP, which means you've effectively given 00:09:34.480 --> 00:09:45.440 away any credibility that you might have had there too. So bottom line, if you have 350 bucks or more to spend, you can buy a 9060XT, I guess, but 00:09:45.440 --> 00:09:49.160 I wouldn't recommend the 8 gig one if you want to get a longer lifespan out of your 00:09:49.160 --> 00:09:54.680 card or you want to upgrade your monitor to 1440p, and whichever one you choose, just 00:09:54.760 --> 00:09:59.920 don't smugly tell yourself that you're supporting the good guy, because AMD's actions speak 00:09:59.920 --> 00:10:04.880 much louder than their words, and they seem content to just draft behind NVIDIA, both 00:10:04.880 --> 00:10:10.000 in good ways and bad, rather than aggressively jump out in front to delight PC gamers who 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:13.800 don't have 800 plus dollars to spend on a GPU. 00:10:13.800 --> 00:10:21.120 AMD, this was kind of your shot. NVIDIA is super distracted at the moment, and unless you do more, your GPU division is going 00:10:21.200 --> 00:10:26.320 to continue to only resonate with a small niche of users who don't mind owning a punching 00:10:26.320 --> 00:10:31.000 bag. And I would deserve to be punched in the bag if I didn't segue to our sponsor. 00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:35.520 If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out our review of the 9070 and 9070XT, it dives 00:10:35.520 --> 00:10:39.120 a little bit deeper into the architectural changes with our DNA4.