At AMD, we believe in supporting transparent, independent coverage that
helps customers make informed decisions. Ah, do you then? Well, then why the
houble hockey sticks didn't you want to send us an 8 gig version of the 960 XT?
Oh, it was based on regional market
demand. Well, the last time I checked, we have a global audience. So, um,
unless there's no demand for a review in the region of
Earth, I don't really get that explanation. No, the more likely reason
is that you were afraid that we would roast your 5060 competitor as hard as we
roasted the 5060, so you put off sending it until we wouldn't have time to test
it before the embargo. But, we can talk more about your shenanigans later.
First, the 9060 XT 16 gig promises to be
the best value card with a 60 in the name in about half a decade, matching
the 5060 Ti 8 gig in performance, outdoing it with double the VRAMm and
beating it on price, which sounds great,
but it also might not be the right thing to buy. And I'll tell you why after I
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1080p is both the most popular gaming resolution today and the most popular
excuse for shipping kneecapped 8 gig cards like the 8 gig RTX 5060 which we
purchased for this review since NVIDIA really doesn't seem to want reviewers
testing those. But with all that said, the truth is if you are playing games at
1080, AMD and NVIDIA are probably right.
It is enough for now, but remember guys,
this is the minimum spec for new AAA titles, and these are cards that cost
$300 plus. Anywh who, across our suite of
games that exist today, the 960 XT performs admirably, but not
spectacularly, keeping up with the 5060 Ti cards, which cost at least $30 more
and asserting a commanding lead over the anemic 5060 nonTi. It outperforms its
last gen counterpart, the 7600 XT, by more than 30% most of the time, which is
enough to highlight how truly awful that card was, but not enough to make the
Intel ARC B580 look like a bad value. Intel's really standing out with their
battle mage architecture. Of course, we would have loved to give you guys 8 gig
numbers. So, this is merely conjecture, but at 1080p raster, you can expect
pretty much identical performance numbers because it's essentially the
same card, sands half of the memory. If we find time to throw one on the bench,
we will have that linked at LT Labs down
below. Okay, so what about the value proposition? Well, that depends. See,
the 9060 XT actually comes in three variants. The 8 gig one that didn't
arrive on time, the base clocked 16 GB model, and the OC variant from Sapphire
that was sent to us. This one has higher power draw and boosted clocks compared
to 16 gig nonoC cards. But other than
that, all of the variants are built on the exact same Nav'i 44 GPU based on
AMD's RDNA4 architecture. This new
architecture brings a bunch of improvements that you can get a deep dive into in our 9070 series review, but
here's the short version. Big improvements in ray tracing and AI that
bring these cards up to speed almost with NVIDIA in non-traditional forms of
rendering and a host of other improvements that allow them to
sometimes even beat NVIDIA in traditional raster. Despite its similar
sounding name though, these new GPUs are substantially cut down compared to their
bigger brothers with about half as many compute units as the 9070 XT. Basically,
they did this, which means we have half the memory bus width, but benefit from
keeping the same IO and 16 PCIe Gen 5
lanes. That last point is key for gamers
who are holding on to older systems where a by8 interface like on some of
NVIDIA and Intel's cards can result in a measurable performance loss. Oh, there
is one thing I lied about on the IO. Interestingly, this card only has three
display outputs. Now, most of you declared this to be a non-issue after
the announcement, but it is the first time that I've seen a $300 card in years
that didn't have four outputs. I digress, though. To compensate for the
cut down die, AMD bumped up the clock speed so that you'll get a bit more than
literally half of the performance of the 9070 XT, which is also why the card
draws a bit over half the power in line with the 5060Ti 8 gig that AMD positions
it against. And in combuster, our card seems to be right in line with the 5060
Ti 8 gig. But interestingly, the story is a bit different in F-124.
In this racing game, AMD's latest pulls an average 174 watts with a maximum
spike of 225 watts. By comparison, the
5060Ti 8 gig averages around 121 watts.
Now, we don't know if this behavior will show up in every game, but this is
enough for us to recommend going for a slightly beefier power supply than the
450 W unit that AMD recommends. Thankfully, this is still relatively low
power draw, meaning that these cards are pretty easy to tame. And even loaded by
a power virus like Combuster, our card stayed both cool and quiet. Let's talk
1440p gaming. AMD claimed 6% better
gaming performance than the 5060 Ti 8 gig at 1440, but looking at our raster
results, we just don't see it. They
score a couple of wins in Alen Wake 2 and Last of Us Part One, but is it
really that impressive of a win when NVIDIA's 8 gig cards can't complete the
test and you just didn't submit your 8 gig card on time for testing? Especially
when we factor in that the 960 XT 16 gig
trails behind the 5060 Ti's and honestly
doesn't even look that stellar against the 5060 in the remainder of our games
here. If you're wondering, by the way, about how the 5070 compares to all this,
we didn't retest that card for this review, so we didn't want to include
stale numbers, but it's a little worse than the 9070 nonXT from back when we
reviewed that. Moving on to ray tracing. Despite the massive leap in RT
performance that came with RDNA4, AMD is still unable to match their direct
NVIDIA competitors. In 1080p RT, the
9060 XT falls well behind the 5060Ti 8
gig in our suite of tests, which is sad. But what really jumped off the charts to
me is NVIDIA's embarrassing loss here with the 5060 not even able to keep up
with the 4060 Ti. I thought they had
improved the ray tracing on Blackwell. What the heck happened? And in 1440p RT
Cyberpunk, things don't look much better. Maybe we can find a happier
story in productivity. No, not really. I mean,
the nice thing about having 16 gigs of memory, if you do, is that it allows you
to dip your toes into AI without being as limited. I mean, look at how all the
8 gig cards fumble as we load up a larger model. But even with 16 gigs, AMD
isn't even close to NVIDIA in terms of performance in our machine learning
tests. It turns out, haha, software support is important. And that only
becomes more clear as we move beyond AI to Blender. Optics go br and HIP
go. Adjusting focus to content creation though, we see big improvements gen over
gen from AMD and they even beat NVIDIA in Da Vinci Resolve, though they trail
behind in the more popular Premier Pro benchmark. All right, well that's the
performance. So, this has been a big load of NH so far. But hey, getting 16
gigs of VRAM and 5060 Ti-ish performance for a theoretical $30 discount, that's
something. It's just it's tough to justify the $50 jump over the 5060,
whose price is tough to justify over a kick in the groin. I mean, to AMD's
credit here, FSR4 has made huge strides,
meaning that other than multiframe gen, which a lot of you aren't that into, AMD
has near par on most of the features that gamers care about. Even their video
encoder is almost as good as Envank these days. They just need to work on
third party support for all of this stuff. So, at the end of the day then, I
don't know. I'm left kind of frustrated. In recent years, AMD has slowly but
surely caught up to NVIDIA in terms of performance and features, but they've
also caught up in terms of their crappy behavior. Last gen, the 7600 XT had 16
gigs and the 7600 nonXT had 8 gigs of
VRAM. It was super easy to tell what you were buying from the name of the
product. This time around, they've lumped both cards together with the same
XT name and then at the same time, as far as we can tell, intentionally made
it more difficult for media to review the 8 gig version, which could lead to
consumer confusion. So AMD, your commitment to the press words kind of
meaningless at this point. And speaking of meaningless promises, you still
haven't managed to get your previous cards into the sales channel anywhere
near MSRP, which means you've effectively given 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 960 XT, I
guess. But I wouldn't recommend the 8 gig one if you want to get a longer
lifespan out of your card or you want to upgrade your monitor to 1440p. And
whichever one you choose, just don't smuggly tell yourself that you're
supporting the good guy, because AMD's actions speak much louder than their
words, and they seem content to just draft behind NVIDIA, both in good ways
and bad, rather than aggressively jump out in front to delight PC gamers who
don't have $800 plus dollars to spend on a GPU. AMD, this was kind of your shot.
NVIDIA is super distracted at the moment, and unless you do more, your GPU
division is going to continue to only resonate with a small niche of users who
don't mind owning a punching bag. And I would deserve to be punched in the bag
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website or domain. If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out our review of
the 9070 and 9070 XT. It dives a little
bit deeper into the architectural changes with RDNA4.