AMD appears to be preparing a Radeon RX 9050 budget card.
The Radeon RX 9000 “RDNA 4” lineup is getting new low-end options, which should help buyers already lost in AMD’s product fog.
AMD currently has two main product series, the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9060. The RX 9070 line includes the 16GB XT, 16GB non-XT and 12GB GRE versions. The RX 9060 line includes the 16GB XT, 8GB XT, 16GB XT LP and non-XT model.
Now AMD’s Radeon team is preparing a new entry-tier series called the RX 9050.
The Radeon RX 9050 will use the same RDNA 4 architecture and a cut-down Navi 44 core.
That means 1024 cores across 16 compute units, which is half the core count of the full Navi 44 chip in the RX 9060 XT.
Based on the listed specs, buyers can expect 64 texture mapping units, 64 ROPs, 32MB of Infinity Cache and 16 RT cores.
AMD is pitching the card as a 1080p “Medium Settings” gaming solution so don’t get your hopes up.
The company claims up to 60FPS in 007, 96FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 and 131FPS in Forza Horizon 6. It claims more than 100FPS to 200FPS in many esports titles.
Specifications revealed through AIB listings show the RX 9050 will come in two memory configurations.
One version gets a 64-bit bus, while the other gets a 128-bit bus, giving AMD 4GB and 8GB models in the same family.
That is where things get daft. The 8GB version at least matches the baseline of the RX 9060 series. The 4GB version is much meaner and could suffer from major bottlenecks, especially in modern games that treat 4GB as something to be sniffed at.
Both versions are expected to use 18Gbps memory.
That gives the 64-bit model just 144GB/s of bandwidth, while the 8GB model gets 288GB/s.
AMD could have called them the RX 9040 4GB and RX 9050 8GB, but that would have involved making sense. Instead, both cards sit under the same RX 9050 badge, despite the memory setups being different.
The RX 9060 series ranges from 132W to 142W, while the RX 9050 8GB models are listed with a 92W TDP.
The real amusement will be the 4GB version. If AMD can tune it down to 75W, it might become vaguely acceptable as a no-PCIe-power card. The models shown so far are dual-fan cards measuring up to 249mm, with dual-slot designs.
That is a lot of cooler for a card that sounds like it should be hiding inside a tiny office box. There is no final word on street pricing, although the official SEP is listed at $279.
Given DRAM shortages and the current state of graphics card pricing, that $279 could become a polite fiction the moment shops smell demand.
That is grim because these are entry-level cards and should really be in the $100 to $200 range.
Availability is listed only for APJ and Latin America markets for now. That means everyone else gets to watch AMD turn the bottom end of RDNA 4 into a regional pricing experiment.
