A new rumour claims that the upcoming AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card will feature a higher game frequency than its bigger sibling while maintaining a full-size PCIe 5.0 interface, contrary to previous claims. If correct, Team Red could avoid some of the criticisms its competition received over its smaller x8 interface, which becomes a bottleneck when the VRAM is saturated.
According to leaker @momomo_us on X, AMD may have settled on keeping the full x16 PCIe 5.0 intact with its mid-range RX 9060 XT 16GB graphics cards, unlike Nvidia, which cut RTX 5060 Ti in half down to x8. This means that RX 9060 XT can enjoy the full 128GB/s bi-directional bandwidth, helping it extract every drop of performance.
Eight lanes are enough in most instances, as they tend to cause minimal performance loss under regular use cases, but when the GPU becomes starved for data due to lack of VRAM, you might see a noticeable performance degradation. More so with older PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 3.0 motherboards. In games, this degradation comes in the form of sudden hitches or freezes as the game engine tries to retrieve data that isn’t stored in VRAM from the main memory or storage.
The leaker has also confirmed some previously circulating specs, adding insight into the GPU frequencies. According to @momomo_us, AMD is planning to push RX 9060 XT GPU up to 3,320MHz boost, with a 2,780MHz game clock. Both are especially noteworthy as they greatly surpass the RX 9070’s official 2,520MHz boost and 2,070MHz game clocks. This should help RX 9060 XT unlock more performance from its Navi 44 XT GPU, which carries only 2,048 cores compared to RX 9070’s 3,584 cores.
On the memory side, RX 9060 XT is expected to house 8GB or 16GB of 20Gb/s GDDR6 memory linked via a smaller 128-bit bus. This translates into 320GB/s of bandwidth, i.e. half that of RX 9070. Though some claim that AMD may have ditched the 8GB variant after seeing the backlash competition received with RTX 5060 Ti 8GB. This combination of specs should allow RX 9060 XT 16GB to deliver around half the performance of RX 9070, perhaps going head-to-head with Nvidia’s RTX 5060 Ti 16GB.
In any case, AMD will likely unveil more information about its Radeon products in a week during Computex 2025. Hopefully, pricing will be adequate, as many have waited a long time for this GPU.
