Introduction

Sapphire Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB Pulse is the company's value custom-design graphics card based on AMD's interesting new performance-segment GPU. The Pulse series graphics cards from Sapphire are typically positioned below the company's NITRO+ and Pure series, but are uncompromising in terms of build quality, boasting a cooler design that prioritizes low noise. The Radeon RX 9060 XT is designed to offer maxed out gameplay at 1080p with ray tracing. It comes at a starting MSRP of $350 for the 16 GB variant being reviewed here. The Radeon RX 9060 XT is powered by the company's latest RDNA 4 graphics architecture, promising a generational leap in both raster and ray tracing performance over the previous RDNA 3-series cards.



Although the previous generation monolithic Radeon RX 7600 was powered by RDNA 3, unlike with the 5 nm/6 nm higher tier RDNA 3 GPUs, AMD built it on the much older 6 nm process node, even as NVIDIA had advanced to the 5 nm node with the RTX 4060. AMD corrected this by not just giving the RX 9060 XT the very latest RDNA 4 architecture, but building the monolithic Navi 44 chip on the 4 nm node—just like the higher tier RDNA 4 chips—with a doubling in transistor count over Navi 33. The new RDNA 4 compute unit provides a significant generational uplift in IPC, introduces new shader execution efficiencies, and a new out-of-order memory management system. The RDNA 4 RT accelerator—according to AMD—provides an over 100% gain in ray tracing performance over RDNA 3. The AI accelerator supports many new high-throughput data formats, providing hardware acceleration for FSR 4, which replaces the shader-based upscaler of FSR 2.2 with a new AI ML-based upscaler that provides significant uplifts in image quality at every performance preset. AMD is further updating FSR 4 with new features later this year under "Project Redstone," more on this later.

Radeon RX 9060 XT maxes out the 4 nm Navi 44 silicon it's based on, which has exactly half the CU count as the Navi 48 chip powering the RX 9070 XT. It comes with 32 CU (compute units), for 2,048 stream processors, 64 AI accelerators, 32 RT accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The card comes with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface. Since AMD is using the older memory standard, this card offers 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory for 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth, a minor 11% increase, even as NVIDIA has moved on to the faster 28 Gbps GDDR7 for the competing RTX 5060/5060 Ti. AMD says that its architecture-level memory management advances more than make up for the modest gains in bandwidth. The Navi 44 chip comes with 32 MB of Infinity Cache memory. An interesting upgrade over the previous generation is AMD giving Navi 44 a full PCI-Express 5.0 x16 host interface, compared to the 8-lane PCIe Gen 4 interfaces it gave the RX 7600 and RX 6600 series, which makes for a quadrupling in host interface bandwidth. More importantly, it ensures the GPU has sufficient PCIe bandwidth on older systems/CPUs that only have PCIe Gen 3, such as the Ryzen 7 5700G "Cezanne" APU.

Sapphire RX 9060 XT 16 GB Pulse comes in a compact board design that should be highly compatible with all modern PC cases. It is 24 cm in length, and is exactly two slots thick. It uses a conventional 8-pin PCIe power input, which is sufficient for its 170 W typical board power. The card comes with factory overclocked speeds of 2700 MHz Game clocks, a generous uplift over the 2530 MHz AMD reference Game clock. Sapphire is pricing the RX 9060 XT Pulse at $365.