- AMD has received quite a lot of flak for making an 8GB version of the RX 9060 XT
- A Team Red exec has argued that this VRAM loadout is fine for 1080p
- Some gamers remain unconvinced and also feel AMD has badly named this new pair of 8GB and 16GB GPUs
AMD has shot back at critics after coming under fire for producing a version of its newly revealed RX 9060 XT graphics card that has an 8GB loadout of video RAM (VRAM).
The RX 9060 XT was revealed earlier this week in both 16GB and 8GB versions. The latter is causing anger, as some argue it is not enough for modern PC gaming, and there are other worries here, too.
Michael Quesada, who runs a Spanish YouTube channel on the topic of PC gaming, aired an indignant post on X asking why AMD (and Nvidia) keep making GPUs with 8GB of VRAM, questioning how that’s justified in 2025.
VideoCardz noticed that Frank Azor, AMD’s head of consumer and gaming marketing, was drawn to reply, as you can see below.
Majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p and have no use for more than 8GB of memory. Most played games WW are mostly esports games. We wouldn’t build it if there wasn’t a market for it. If 8GB isn’t right for you then there’s 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory…May 22, 2025
Azor observes that most gamers are still running at 1080p resolution and, therefore, don’t need more than 8GB of VRAM. The AMD exec notes that the most popular games are esports titles, which are less demanding, and that Team Red wouldn’t make an 8GB graphics card if there wasn’t a demand for it.
Azor concludes: “If 8GB isn’t right for you then there’s 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory options.”
Analysis: No compromise, but plenty of cynicism
To be fair to Azor, there’s some truth to what the executive says here. Certainly, for a more casual level of gaming, as well as esports titles that are built for fluid frame rates in general, as that’s more important than graphical bells and whistles to competitive players, 8GB is likely enough.
As others point out, it’s not enough for all PC games, even at 1080p resolution. Although tweaking graphics details suitably and making some compromises, you can generally get by, albeit there are notable exceptions even at 1080p.
But despite the noise made by the ‘8GB just isn’t enough these days’ camp on social media – and it is a fair old racket, make no mistake – some of the negative feeling here is more about deceptive naming.
Rather than having the RX 9060 XT 8GB and RX 9060 XT 16GB, there should have been a clear naming delineation between these two variants. The most prevalent suggestion is that AMD should’ve called the 8GB spin the plain old RX 9060, dropping the XT suffix.
Why is making that naming distinction important? Because what can happen with both graphics cards being called the ‘RX 9060 XT’ is that system builders simply list that as the GPU in any given PC, with no accompanying memory details. Less informed consumers may not even be aware that there are two different variants of the RX 9060 XT.
They may have perused opinions or reviews of the 16GB flavor and assume that’s what they are getting in their shiny new PC, when in fact it has the somewhat inferior 8GB GPU.
PC builders may deliberately not make that clear, because the system is cheaper to produce with the RX 9060 XT 8GB, but they won’t drop the price to consider that. In other words, this is a knowledge trap for the unwary and a way for system makers to take advantage of them. And it’s an avenue AMD could have shut off with different names for the 8GB and 16GB cards.
AMD might argue that it intends to have an RX 9060 vanilla GPU in the future, so it couldn’t use that name, but surely it could’ve found some suitable way of denoting the difference. Such as calling the 16GB version the 9060 XTX (although that’s a suffix reserved for the flagship GPU, you get the idea).
There’s a level of unhappiness and cynicism around the naming here, in short, and we should note this applies to Nvidia as well as AMD (with Team Green’s xx60 Ti models that have both 8GB and 16GB versions in the same vein).
AMD does get some credit here for ensuring it hasn’t further hamstrung the RX 9060 XT for some gamers with older motherboards by halving the number of supported PCIe lanes. Still, I won’t go into that here, as it’s getting sidetracked really (and it’s something I’ve discussed elsewhere).
To summarize: 8GB should be okay for a lot of games at 1080p resolution, with some down-tuning of graphics details as appropriate – but it won’t work well for everything, and the level of future-proofing feels wonky indeed.
On top of that, be careful of prebuilt PCs that list an RX 9060 XT graphics card with no accompanying spec info – it’s almost certainly going to be the 8GB version, and you may be paying more for it than you should.
For those buying a standalone RX 9060 XT, it makes sense to pay the premium for the 16GB version. It’s worth doing so for future-proofing alone, and it promises to be an excellent graphics card for the money overall.
That said, this assumes the premium is roughly 15% extra as per the MRSPs and that demand for the 9060 XT 16GB doesn’t considerably inflate the price. If it does, then that muddles the value equation a lot more. Hopefully, stock won’t be a problem, though, if the rumors are right. It’s only if supply is thin that jacked-up prices start to rear their ugly heads.
If another rumor is correct, the 16GB board will be the RX 9060 XT model predominantly stocked at retailers, so that’ll be the one you mostly see if you’re on the hunt for an AMD GPU, anyway.
Although that also brings the suggestion that the 8GB flavor is being kept more to PC builders, which could fan the aforementioned flames of cynicism around this whole affair – assuming this is anything more than empty chatter.
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