AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT is up to 31% faster than 7600 XT in early compute benchmarks

AMD's recently announced mid-range RX 9060 XT 16GB has been put to the test in Geekbench across Vulkan and OpenCL, where it allegedly leads its predecessor by up to 30%. This test was likely and inadvertently made public by a reviewer, consistent with previous product launches. We strongly advise viewing these tests with skepticism, firstly due to their preliminary nature and secondly because synthetic benchmarks only provide a partial glimpse of a GPU's real-world capabilities.

After weeks of rumors and leaks, AMD finally lifted the veil off its budget RX 9060 XT GPUs at Computex last week. The RX 9060 XT family comes in 8GB ($299) and 16GB ($349) flavors, both using the same 200mm^2 Navi 48 GPU core with 32 Compute Units or 2,048 Stream Processors. AMD has transitioned to a PCIe 5.0 x16 (64 GB/s) interface for these GPUs, as opposed to the PCIe 4.0 x8 (16 GB/s) on last-generation RX 7600 XT cards. Likewise, the RX 9060 XT features a 3.13 GHz boost clock speed, extendable via manual or factory overclocking, along with a 150W/160W Total Board Power (TBP).

The test-bench for these benchmarks featured an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 32GB of DDR5 memory atop the Gigabyte X870E Auros Master, and the RX 9060 XT 16GB. We've compiled publicly available test results for various relevant GPUs in Vulkan and OpenCL using Geekbench's repository. The RX 9060 XT managed to score 109,315 points and 124,251 points in OpenCL and Vulkan, respectively. This marks a solid 31.21% improvement over its last-generation counterpart, the RX 7600 XT, in Vulkan.

As expected, it falls short of its RX 9070 counterparts: 31.24% slower than the RX 9070 XT and as much as 24.4% slower than the RX 9070. Direct comparisons in synthetic tests between Nvidia and AMD are generally unreliable due to driver, optimization, and architectural differences. But for the sake of argument, the RX 9060 XT trails the RTX 5060 by 11% in OpenCL, while establishing a 5% lead in Vulkan. As expected, this anomaly stems from the inherent design differences between the two GPUs, and we'll only get a clear picture once independent reviews go live.

Synthetics might not push VRAM to its limits, but real-world gaming performance often relies on it. This is evident with the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, struggling to keep up with its 16GB counterpart in VRAM-bound titles, even at 1080p. While AMD asserts the RX 9060 XT 8GB is designed for the majority of gamers, engaged in esports at 1080p, critics are still questioning the firm's rationale behind this model.

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