ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition Review - Mainstream RDNA 4 is a Winner

TweakTown Rating: 85%

Our Verdict

As a mainstream RDNA 4 GPU, the new ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition offers a viable alternative to the GeForce RTX 5060 Series thanks to new technology like FSR 4, 16GB of VRAM for better 1440p support, and improved ray-tracing. A big step up from RDNA 3.

Pros

• Ray-tracing on a mainstream Radeon GPU is now a reality
• 16GB of VRAM means bottleneck-free 1080p and 1440p gaming
• FSR 4 looks fantastic at 1440p and is a game-changer at 1080p too
• A massive generational improvement over RDNA 3's Radeon RX 7600
• ASUS's wallet-friendly PRIME design is a winner

Cons

• FSR 4 adoption still has a long way to go to catch up to DLSS
• Performance falls short of matching or beating the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti

Should you buy it?

AvoidConsiderShortlistBuy

Buy at PC Case Gear for $649 AUD

Introduction

After testing a few different Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB GPUs, alongside a few GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti GPUs, it's clear that AMD has delivered its best mainstream graphics card in years. With 16GB of VRAM, an overhauled RDNA 4 architecture that levels up ray-tracing performance, and the arrival of the AI-powered FSR 4, PC gamers looking for a 1080p or 1440p GPU can now seriously consider and choose Radeon over GeForce RTX. Not that you couldn't make a case for previous generation mainstream Radeon RX graphics cards being capable performers, but there's a lot of additional value that comes from ticking a few boxes that were previously 'GeForce RTX only' or RTX dominated.

Like the GeForce RTX 50 Series and the arrival of DLSS 4, the Radeon RX 9000 Series' new FSR 4 technology is one of the most impressive components of AMD's new RDNA 4 generation for PC gamers. With a new powerful AI model now handling FidelityFX Super Resolution, the difference between FSR 2 and FSR 3 versus FSR 4 is night and day. Image quality is detailed, sharp, and full of detail that wasn't there before. It's so good that FSR is now not only a viable alternative to DLSS, but something you should enable, wherever it's available, at 1440p or even 1080p.

For 1440p gaming on the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition reviewed here, FSR 4 can be viewed as a free boost to performance delivered via software and AI hardware that offers native-like results. In Call of Duty: Ops 6, gaming with the Ultra quality preset, 84 FPS becomes 113 FPS with FSR 4. Likewise, in Horizon Forbidden West, 73 FPS becomes 84 FPS. These double-digit gains while maintaining excellent image quality are not something we've seen in previous Radeon generations, making it a game-changer for the mainstream Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB GPU.

54

Mainstream GPUs priced between $300 and $400 dominate the PC gaming landscape, with the Steam Hardware Survey results showing that PC gamers are currently using cards like the GeForce RTX 3060 and RTX 4060 for their day-to-day gaming. As one of the only GPUs for $350 with 16GB of VRAM, the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition is a fantastic option for 1080p and 1440p gaming, where it's 61% faster than the RTX 3060 and 41% faster than the RTX 4060 for 1440p gaming. These are the sort of numbers that make a real difference, with performance improvements you can feel.

The other key area where RDNA 4 makes significant strides, outside of AI-powered upscaling with FSR 4, is ray-tracing performance. Although it's not quite at the level of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB GPU gives the baseline GeForce RTX 5060 a run for its money in several RT-heavy titles like Cyberpunk 2077. Yes, real competition has arrived in the mainstream space, so let's dig into why you might want to choose the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition over the competition.

Best Deals: ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition

	Today	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$649 AUD	-	$649 AUD	Buy
* Prices last scanned 3/10/2026 at 1:12 am CDT - prices may be inaccurate. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. We earn affiliate commission from any Newegg or PCCG sales.

RDNA 4 - AMD Levels the Playing Field

Below is a summary of AMD's new RDNA 4 architecture, applicable to all models.

AMD's new RDNA 4 architecture presents a massive improvement over the chiplet design that we saw with RDNA 3. Returning to the monolithic design of RDNA and RDNA 2 might sound like a regression, especially when AMD CPUs have gone in the other direction, but this isn't the case. In a nutshell, RDNA 4 is built for 2025. This GPU architecture embraces ray-tracing performance as a key pillar, lays the groundwork for neural rendering, and supercharges AI performance for the new FSR 4 Super Resolution and complex AI workloads. Throw in a revamped media engine for creators and streamers, and support for next-gen DisplayPort 2.1a displays, and RDNA 4 presents a new and revitalized direction for Radeon graphics.

54

RDNA 4's overhauled Compute Unit, which houses all of the raster, ray-tracing, and AI hardware, has seen several enhancements over RDNA 3 and is one of the reasons why the Radeon RX 9000 Series GPUs deliver impressive performance gains. The RDNA 4 Compute Unit, or CU, features an enhanced memory subsystem, improved scalar units (for raw raster), dynamic register allocation to reduce latency and bottlenecks, and increased efficiency. The improvements also mean that Radeon RX 9000 Series GPUs can ship with much higher clock speeds than their RDNA 3 counterparts, hitting close to 3 GHz in several 9070 XT models, with 9060 XT models pushing up to 3.3 GHz.

The show's star, at least in terms of the massive improvement over what has come before, has to be the arrival of RDNA 4's 3rd Generation Ray-Tracing Accelerators. AMD is aware that game developers across PC and console are embracing ray-tracing, which presents a realistic depiction of lighting and related effects like shadows and reflections. The only problem is that real-time ray-tracing is complex, requiring the right blend of raw performance and innovative technologies to enhance efficiency and deliver a playable experience.

One area RDNA 4's RT Accelerator delivers where RDNA 3's don't is the arrival of "Oriented Bounding Boxes," an innovative method of handling ray-tracing Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) data. Think of it as efficiently tracing rays through an environment and geometry with a lower memory cost and less hardware. RDNA 4's RT Accelerator also adds a second intersection engine to double the performance of specific raytracing workloads and calculations. The results can be seen in titles with heavy ray-tracing like Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077, where the Radeon RX 9070 XT delivers a significant 30+% performance improvement over the previous gen flagship - the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. A card with 50% more RT Accelerators than the Radeon RX 9070 XT. The mainstream Radeon RX 9060 XT also delivers substantially faster ray-tracing performance than the Radeon RX 7600, to the point where mainstream RDNA 4 is now what you'd call RT-ready.

54

RDNA 4 also fully embraces AI, with new AI accelerators that support FP8 while delivering double the FP16 and four times the INT8 performance compared to RDNA 3's AI accelerators. For gamers, this means the new AI-powered FSR 4 leverages AI to deliver a massive improvement in image quality over FSR 3. However, AMD's custom AI model, which was trained on powerful AMD Instinct hardware, is FP8-based, so it is exclusive to RDNA 4 hardware.

AMD is also looking to introduce its answer to NVIDIA's DLSS Ray Reconstruction and Frame Generation for Path Tracing with Project Redstone's new AI-based Ray Regeneration and Frame Generation, alongside support for Neural Radiance Caching. FSR "Project Redstone" is currently in development and on track for release in the second half of 2025.

With improved raw performance and a massive boost to ray-tracing and AI performance, RDNA 4 presents an enormous leap forward over RDNA 3. However, catching up to GeForce RTX in these areas and offering a viable DLSS alternative does mean that early adopters will need to wait for game support and AMD to deliver its Path Tracing solution. With 60+ FSR 4-ready titles available now, there's still a massive deficit compared to DLSS 3 and DLSS 4 as we head toward 2026. Falling behind for over five years in these areas means there's a lot of catching up to do, and this will take time.

This brings us to RDNA 4's enhanced Media Engine, which offers creators and streamers a big improvement to H.264, HEVC, and AV1 encoding and decoding. NVIDIA's lead in this area has meant that few creators use Radeon hardware. With RDNA 4, AMD is looking to close the gap and offer a viable alternative, especially regarding image quality when using popular settings in apps like OBS.

Specs and Test System

Specifications

Here's a comparison of the Radeon RX 9060 XT specs to those of the previous generation's Radeon RX 7600 XT and the Radeon RX 9070 Series.

The Radeon RX 9060 XT, like the RTX 5060 Ti, has arrived in two flavors - one with 8GB and one with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. This review of the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition and previous reviews of Radeon RX 9060 XT GPUs on TweakTown strictly cover performance and what to expect with the 16GB option. As of writing, we haven't yet gotten our hands on an 8GB model, but we expect a notable difference in 1440p gaming performance, like we saw once we tested a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB card.

Compared to the Radeon RX 9070 XT, the Radeon RX 9060 XT's specs read like the flagship RDNA 4 GPU's specs cut in half: 32 compute units instead of 64, with half the Stream Processor, Ray Accelerator, and AI Accelerator count. Looking back at the previous generation's Radeon RX 7600, the configuration seems similar; however, RDNA 4 features so many architectural improvements compared to RDNA 3 that the performance difference between the two cards is massive.

54

The difference between 2nd Gen Ray Accelerators versus 3rd Gen is ray-traced effects rendered at a playable frame-rate versus a slideshow, and the difference between 2nd Gen AI Accelerators versus 3rd Gen is FSR 4 versus FSR 3. Plus, it doesn't hurt that mainstream RDNA 4 is now on a more cutting-edge TSMC 4nm process, which helps make the Radeon RX 9060 XT the most efficient and powerful Radeon GPU with this level of performance released to date, even with GPU Boost Clock speeds pushing as high as 3.3 GHz on the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition.

Although it's great to see 16GB on a $350 GPU, the GDDR6 memory does run on a slower 128-bit interface than the Radeon RX 9070 Series. The memory is slower than the GDDR7 memory found on the GeForce RTX 5060 Series; however, it's clocked at 20.1 Gbps to boost the overall bandwidth and close the gap a little. The other benefit from having 16GB of VRAM and more powerful AI hardware is the ability for the Radeon RX 9060 XT to become an affordable GPU for AI workloads and working with models that wouldn't be able to run on an 8GB GPU like the GeForce RTX 5060.

Kosta's Test System

Physical Design and Cooling

For the new GeForce RTX 50 Series and Radeon RX 900 Series, ASUS's revamped 2025 PRIME GPU design has quickly become the latest affordable ASUS model for those looking to pick up a GPU at a price that resembles the MSRP. After testing several different ASUS PRIME cards this year, it's safe to say that it's one of the best 'MSRP' options for PC gamers. The triple-fan cooling, robust build quality, and premium cooling make it a great choice - unless you absolutely have to have a card with RGB lighting.

54

As a 2.5-slot GPU, the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition sports a sleek all-black curved look with some white lines for added texture and prominent Radeon and PRIME branding. ASUS's design is compact enough to fit in most cases, and the build quality is uniformly excellent, even with a mostly plastic outer shell. The three Axial-tech fans with Dual-Ball Fan Bearing remain quiet when gaming, with a 0dB mode turning them off when browsing or you're running a non-intensive workload.

54

The stylish, fully enclosed casing includes a full metal backplate, which also houses a Dual BIOS switch so you can switch to a more aggressive fan curve while maintaining the same high-end settings. Under the hood, you'll find ASUS's precision 'MaxContact' manufacturing on the heat spreader, which improves thermal performance, and a 'GPU Guard' adhesive to secure the GPU chip and prevent cracks. Overall, the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition is a robust GPU with excellent thermal performance that keeps GPU and memory temperatures low.

The Games and Tests

PC gaming not only covers a wide range of genres and styles, from indie games with simple 2D graphics to massive 3D worlds lit by cutting-edge real-time ray tracing technology. With that, the needs and requirements of each gamer vary. High refresh rates and latency reduction become more important than flashy visuals or playing at the highest resolution possible for those who live and breathe fast-paced competitive games. For those who want to live in a cinematic world and become a key player in an expansive narrative, ray-tracing, and high-fidelity visuals are a stepping stone toward immersion.

54

Our chosen benchmarks cover various games, engines, APIs, and technologies. For the Radeon RX 9060 XT, all tests are run at 1080p and 1440p and include results for performance-boosting Super Resolution technologies like AMD's new AI-powered FSR 4, alongside older FSR 3 and FSR 2 versions. However, our benchmark results are still sorted using 'raw performance' or native rendering.

Here's the breakdown of games, settings, and what's being tested.

Games and Settings Benchmarked

Path Tracing Games and Settings Benchmarked

Gaming Performance Analysis - 1080p and 1440p

Average Gaming Performance - 1080p Results

54

Built on AMD's new RDNA 4 architecture, the Radeon RX 9060 XT is the first mainstream GPU from Team Red built for modern gaming with ray-tracing effects enabled. With ray-tracing now available in more and more games on PC and console, this is excellent news and one of the reasons why the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition's average 1080p gaming performance is 53% faster than the previous-gen Radeon RX 7600. You do not see a 53% gen-on-gen improvement every day; however, it's still not quite enough to blow NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5060 Series out of the water.

Compared to the baseline GeForce RTX 5060 8GB GPU, the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition is 7% faster, on average, for 1080p gaming. A modest increase that means its overall performance falls short of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB and 16GB GPUs by around 5%. Yes, with not much separating these cards, you have to look at individual benchmark results to get a clear picture of where one card's strengths lie over another. The Radeon RX 9060 XT pulls ahead of the RTX 5060 in most titles, including those with ray-tracing.

And when it comes to Call of Duty, it's no contest, with the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition delivering results that are on par with the GeForce RTX 5070. Call of Duty is a game where Radeon GPUs perform exceptionally well and much better than their GeForce RTX counterparts, so if you're a CoD gamer, you might want to choose Team Red over Team Green. However, that's the exception to the rule, and even though FSR 4 is a game-changer for AMD's upscaling, DLSS still has the edge regarding image quality and game adoption, making it more of a killer feature, for now.

Average Gaming Performance - 1440p Results

54

With 16GB of VRAM, the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition is better suited for 1440p gaming than the baseline GeForce RTX 5060 and the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB. Here, the card's overall performance sits 10% higher than the GeForce RTX 5060, and around 10% lower than the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPU, which is reflected in the pricing of all three cards. That said, it's still a whopping 61% faster than the Radeon RX 7600 and GeForce RTX 3060 and 41% faster than the GeForce RTX 4060.

With affordable and high-quality 1440p displays now very much a reality, buying a new mainstream GPU should be an exercise in picking something up for both 1080p and 1440p gaming. Suppose you're upgrading from an older GPU like the GeForce RTX 3060 or even the RTX 2060. In that case, the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition is a fantastic choice as it opens the door to a new level of 1440p performance, which also benefits immensely from FSR 4, which looks great at this resolution.

As impressive as the Radeon RX 9060 XT is, it's worth noting that there's a sizeable performance gap between it and the next model up, the baseline Radeon RX 9070. For 1440p gaming, the beefier Radeon RX 9070 is around 50% faster, making it a more ideal GPU for pushing 100+ FPS in a wide range of games while being able to handle heavier ray-tracing workloads. The Radeon RX 9070 features a 57% higher MSRP, which means that the Radeon RX 9060 XT isn't as much of a game changer as a card offering similar performance per dollar value.

Benchmarks - 3DMark Synthetic Tests

3DMark offers a suite of synthetic benchmarks built to test GPUs in various scenarios. 3DMark Steel Nomad is a cutting-edge DirectX 12 benchmark with newer, modern rendering techniques designed to push GPUs to their limit. The 'Light' version tests at 1440p, while the main Steel Nomad benchmark tests pure native 4K rendering. Port Royal is a benchmark focusing exclusively on real-time ray tracing for lighting effects like reflections, shadows, and more.

Steel Nomad, the successor to Time Spy, is 3DMark's benchmark designed to reflect current AAA gaming and the next several years of blockbuster interactive entertainment. Interestingly, for the 1440p-based Steel Nomad Light test, the Radeon RX 9060 XT's score does not quite hit the expected level, as it falls short of the GeForce RTX 5060. Even though the score is 39% higher than the Radeon RX 7600, that difference is higher in real-world tests. As for the 4K Steel Nomad benchmark, the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition's score more closely reflects what we found when gaming, with it being 64% higher than the Radeon RX 7600, 16% higher than the baseline GeForce RTX 5060, and on par with the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti.

54

The ray-tracing-focused Port Royal benchmark results showcase how much better RDNA 4's ray-tracing is compared to RDNA 3. Here, the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition's score is 69% higher than the Radeon RX 7600 and 10% higher than the GeForce RTX 5060. Although it still falls short of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti by around 10%, this is something you'll find in many titles with ray-tracing. Ultimately, you can turn on these hardware-intensive effects on a mainstream Radeon GPU and have a great experience, and that's a big win for the RDNA 4 generation.

Benchmarks - 1080p Gaming

Benchmarks - 1440p Gaming

FSR 4 and AMD Frame Generation

With the arrival of the Radeon RX 900 Series and the new Radeon RX 9070, AMD's new FSR 4 represents a massive improvement over FSR 3.1, FSR 3, and FSR 2. The shift to a custom and powerful AI model for upscaling shows that ML or AI is the definite way to maintain image quality that is on par or even superior to native rendering. As FSR 4 was explicitly designed for RDNA 4, and trained on powerful AMD hardware, it is exclusive to the Radeon RX 9000 Series due to the advanced AI hardware requirements. The good news is that games with FSR 3.1 are automatically upgraded to FSR 4 via AMD's Adrenalin Software, with a nice overlay showing a green FSR 4 tick when booting up a compatible game.

54

The introduction to this review has already gone through how much of a game-changer FSR 4 is to AMD's upscaling, and at 1440p, it's worth enabling on the Radeon RX 9060 XT wherever it's an option. With the arrival of the Radeon RX 9060 XT, FSR 4 is now available in over 60 games, with the list expected to grow throughout 2025 to over 100 games. As FSR 4's driver override requires a game to support at least FSR 3.1, the adoption of AMD's new upscaling tech has been moderately fast but nowhere near the level we've seen with DLSS 4. Image quality is excellent, and the difference between FSR 4 and FSR 3 is stark. However, most FSR-supported titles still use the older FSR 2 or 3 version of the technology, so it's only titles with FSR 4 where we'd recommend enabling the technology without question.

Testing AMD's Frame Generation, introduced with FSR 3, with FSR 4 is interesting because even though you're getting a dramatic boost to perceived performance or smoothness in a game, the image quality does suffer in a way that it doesn't when using NVIDIA's Multi Frame Generation. It's still impressive and worth enabling as a trade-off for performance to match a high refresh-rate display if it's something you're okay with. The good news is that AMD's AI-powered Frame Generation for FSR 4 is set to arrive later this year, and it will be interesting to see if it can also close the gap with DLSS to offer better image quality and latency compared to the current implementation.

Path Tracing Performance - 1080p

Path Tracing takes real-time ray-tracing and applies the concept of ray-traced effects to anything and everything - global illumination, shadows, reflections, indirect lighting, and more. With multiple bounces, it's a hardware-intensive and cutting-edge look at the future of PC gaming that is only possible thanks to AI tools and technologies. With RDNA 4 dramatically improving ray-tracing performance compared to RDNA 3, GPUs like the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB are capable of rendering stunning Path Traced visuals; however, it's more proof of concept than something practical.

Path Tracing on RDNA 4 GPUs like the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB is proof of concept, not because it's something limited to 1080p with upscaling and Frame Generation, but because FSR 4's feature set hasn't yet been updated to match DLSS 4. Path Tracing or Full Ray Tracing on Radeon offers a less detailed and inferior experience than Path Tracing on GeForce RTX. This is set to change once the FSR 4 'Redstone' update adds AI denoising, AI Frame Generation, and AI rendering to boost performance, with these charts for Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 showcasing that the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB GPU should be able to offer a Full Ray Tracing experience on par with the RTX 4060 Ti - assuming 'Redstone' tech lives up to its promise.

54

However, there is one game that the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition might be able to handle 1440p Path Tracing with FSR 4 and the new 'Redstone' update - and that's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This game looks next-gen with Path Tracing, but it's one of the best-performing ray-traced games out there, thanks to running on a modified version of id Tech.

Temperature and Power Efficiency

54

Even with its generous out-of-the-box overclocked settings, the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition runs remarkably cool when stressed, with the GPU temperature hovering around 50 degrees Celsius. With ASUS's PRIME model pulling around 155W when gaming on average, you're looking at a GPU perfect for compact, efficient, and affordable PC builds.

Final Thoughts

RDNA 4 has, so far, been a success for AMD because it shows us that the company is willing to not only compete when it comes to things like raw performance and pricing, but it will invest in technologies and new features to offer a comparable feature set to what you get with a GeForce RTX 50 Series GPU. From the arrival of FSR 4 to the improved ray-tracing performance to the enhanced media engine for creators, the Radeon RX 9060 XT feels like Team Red's most complete mainstream option in years. However, there's still an element of 'playing catch-up' with NVIDIA's DLSS 4 suite and creator-focused software and hardware, which is still the gold standard for gaming GPUs.

54

Also, with the huge performance gap between the ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB OC Edition and the next model up, the Radeon RX 9070 (which is 50% faster for 1440p gaming), the 9060 XT isn't quite the outright GeForce RTX 5060 killer we were expecting it to be. However, with ASUS's excellent PRIME model currently sporting an MSRP-friendly $350 price tag, you're looking at one of the best value 1440p 16GB gaming GPUs out there. The fact that we've got a mainstream RDNA GPU that has no issue playing titles with heavy ray-tracing effects at 1080p is fantastic to see, and with FSR 4, you can also push AAA ray-tracing to 1440p.