AMD launches the RX 9050, and it's even more entry-level than expected

AMD has launched a new graphics card, the RX 9050. This is an entry-level graphics card with a slim provision of cores and VRAM, more of a match for the 890M than the RX 9060. It's even more entry-level than initial rumours suggested, and while you'd hope for a great price to match, we're not getting our hopes up yet.

Take a look at the specifications below, right from AMD's website, and you'll get an idea of the card. It's using the same Navi 44 GPU as the more capable entry-level and mid-range graphics cards, but it's been trimmed down to within an inch of its life. At 1,024 cores, it is actually a match for the 890M GPU found in Strix Point mobile chips, though it does have the big benefit of a desktop power budget, even if only 92 watts; RDNA 4 architecture, and 32 MB of Infinity Cache.

RX 9050 specs

RX 9050

RX 9060

GPU

Navi 44

Navi 44

Architecture

RDNA 4

RDNA 4

Compute Units (CUs)

16

28

Cores

1024

1792

Boost clock

2600

2990

Game clock

1920

2400

ROPs

64

64

Ray Accelerators

16

28

AI Accelerators

32

56

FP32 TFLOPs

10.6

21.4

Transistors

29.7

29.7

Memory capacity (GB)

8/4*

8

Memory speed (Gbps)

18

18

Memory type

GDDR6

GDDR6

Memory interface

128-bit

128-bit

Memory bandwidth (GB/s)

288

288

Infinity Cache (MB)

32

32

Typical Board Power (W)

92

132

Minimum PSU (W)

450

450

*not confirmed

Compared to previous rumours, which my colleague Jacob Fox called "quite strange" when we published a story about them in May, it's a lot less capable than expected. Look to the TFLOPs for a more holistic view of what's going on, and the RX 9050 is actually rated to half the performance of the RX 9060. Bear in mind, TFLOPs does not directly correlate to game performance, but it's a general idea of what to expect.

It's tough to judge a graphics card without knowing the price. ASRock is the only partner to announce availability for the RX 9050, launching its own RX 9050 Challenger 8 GB card. There's no clear price for the card yet and it's set to launch only in LATAM and Asia Pacific.

The card may end up being more OEM-only elsewhere. The RX 9060 is OEM-only. Only Best Buy has the card for sale so far, inside a CyberPower gaming PC for $890. This includes an RX 9050 4 GB among its shoestring specification.

Yeah, 4 GB.

What's that about? The AMD website only lists an 8 GB model, though that listing is only talking about a "Max Memory Size" of 8 GB, while earlier rumours had suggested a 4 GB model would be part of the range. ASRock also only talks about an 8 GB model.

So is this CyberPower listing incorrect? I'd love to think so, but it may well be the case that there's an even slimmer 4 GB model for OEMs. If that's the case, it's no surprise then that AMD isn't shouting about it to the world. That's a pitiful amount of memory for 2026—AMD actually rallied against 4 GB cards back in 2022.

"Competitive products at a similar entry level price-point are offering up to a maximum of 4GB of VRAM, which is evidently not enough for today's games," AMD said in a blog post. "Go Beyond 4GB of Video Memory to Crank Up your settings. Play on Radeon RX Series GPUs with 6GB or 8GB of VRAM and enjoy gaming at Max settings."

Let's just hope this 4 GB thing is a typo and any plans to release such a card have been brushed aside.

With the RDNA 4 architecture under the hood, the RX 9060 will at least have some benefits over older cards. The full FSR Redstone feature set is supported by RDNA 4, including Frame Generation and Ray Regeneration. Though we tend to find frame generation works best when the card is able to deliver a good amount of frames to begin with, which this card may struggle to do in the latest games. At least FSR 4 is natively supported, including FP8. This card might need it.