Latest news with #graphicscard
Digital Trends
27-05-2025
- Business
- Digital Trends
I'm excited for the RX 9060 XT, but AMD needs to fix one major problem
AMD has recently announced the RX 9060 XT graphics card during Computex 2025. While no one expects it to beat any of the best graphics cards, it can certainly make some waves, and I couldn't be more excited. Except… There's one cloud in this otherwise clear sky, and it's a big one. The RX 9060 XT is well-positioned to succeed. It might very well be a more popular pick than Nvidia's recent RTX 5060. So why am I still worried about it? Recommended Videos It's a tough time to buy a GPU My colleague, Jon Martindale, recently said that Nvidia's RTX 50-series was the worst GPU launch in recent memory. I'm inclined to agree, but that just makes me think … What about AMD? Going into the RX 9000 series, I made sure to temper my expectations. I knew that AMD would steer clear of the high-end this time around, and honestly, I understood. Without any major hype, I awaited the launch of the RX 9070 XT. And I was blown away. The RX 9070 XT offers the kind of performance you'd expect from a pricier card. Sure, AMD could (or should?) have undercut Nvidia a bit more, but the $599 price tag felt fair for what the GPU was able to offer. It was no RTX 5090 killer, but it was a solid 1440p card through and through. Demand today for our new @amdradeon cards has been phenomenal. We are working with our AIBs to replenish stock at our partners ASAP in the coming days and weeks. MSRP pricing (excluding region specific tariffs and/or taxes) will continue to be encouraged beyond today so don't… — Frank Azor (@AzorFrank) March 6, 2025 As I always tend to root for the underdog, I was thrilled when I saw the warm reception the RX 9070 XT received. The card was flying off the shelves, and AMD made sure that there'd be some MSRP models available, so people were getting a GPU at a reasonable price. AMD's Frank Azor said that, despite the 'phenomenal' demand for the RX 9070 XT and non-XT, the company was working with its add-in board (AIB) partners to ensure that it'd come back soon, and with MSRP pricing being 'encouraged.' Unfortunately, one quick peek through various retailers tells me that the encouragement may not have been enough. The hype was real, but … At first, the RX 9070 XT was simply largely sold out. But when it started coming back on the shelves, it was hardly ever available at MSRP anymore. Even now, when the hype has died down and the GPU is readily available at retailers, the pricing is still — well, to put it bluntly — horrible. The cheapest RX 9070 XT I've been able to spot on Amazon sits at $839, and that's a discount from the previous price of $899. The priciest one costs $1,058. This is for a card that was meant to sell at $599. The RX 9070 — originally $549 — fares slightly better, but it's still overpriced. The prices sit around the $650 to $750 mark, which isn't great. With the pricing the way it is now, AMD's new GPUs sold one important aspect of what made them so great: Value for the money. The cards, while solid, fail to impress when they're selling for $200 to $400 above the price they were meant to sell at. That $1,000 GPU pricing bracket deserves better performance than what the RX 9070 XT can provide, but at $600, AMD is the indisputable king of value in the GPU market. It's just that the $600 MSRP doesn't seem real anymore. The prices aren't normalizing fast enough for it to drop all the way down to $600 anytime soon. The good news (for AMD, not so much for the rest of us) is that Nvidia is sitting in the exact same boat. The RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti are all super overpriced. The RTX 5060 Ti is too, but to a smaller extent. Meanwhile, the RTX 5060 is selling at MSRP, but after various controversies surrounding the card and the lack of reviews on launch day, that might not change anytime soon. With Nvidia also struggling to maintain the recommended list price at retailers, it's the perfect time for AMD to strike back with the RX 9060 XT — but will it? Will history repeat itself? I hold every hope that the RX 9060 XT will turn out to be nothing short of excellent. The 16GB version delivers something mainstream gamers are slowly growing desperate to have: More VRAM. It ramps up the pricing, but at $350, it's still cheaper than Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti. The 128-bit memory bus will stifle its bandwidth, but I'm still hopeful about it being a good card. None of that will matter if AMD doesn't address the elephant in the room: The availability at MSRP. The RX 9060 XT will be a mainstream, or midrange, card. Aimed mostly at 1080p gaming, it doesn't have the luxury of appealing to enthusiasts — it's made to appeal to gamers who care about the price-to-performance aspect of it. Boost the price too much, and it'll be out of reach for many PC gamers. Fixing the MSRP issue for the RX 9070 XT is important, but addressing it for the RX 9060 XT might be even more so. With Nvidia struggling with these same problems, it'd be great for AMD to strike while the iron is hot and try to ensure that the RX 9060 XT stays at MSRP for longer than however long it takes for the first batch to sell out. If the RX 9070 XT can beat Nvidia's RTX 5060, and it can stay near MSRP while offering 16GB of RAM, there'll be a clear winner for every upcoming midrange PC build in the next few months — and I really hope that can be the case. I want the RX 9060 XT to succeed, and I know that it can. I'm only worried that the current market won't permit it, and that might put a dampener on the success of what otherwise seems like a great GPU.
The Verge
22-05-2025
- The Verge
Nvidia's RTX 5060 review debacle should be a wake-up call for gamers and reviewers
Nvidia has gone too far. This week, the company reportedly attempted to delay, derail, and manipulate reviews of its $299 GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, which would normally be its bestselling GPU of the generation. Nvidia has repeatedly and publicly said the budget 60-series cards are its most popular, and this year it reportedly tried to ensure that by withholding access and pressuring reviewers to paint the new 5060 in the best light possible. Nvidia might have wanted to prevent a repeat of 2022, when it launched this card's predecessor. Those reviews were harsh. The 4060 was called a 'slap in the face to gamers' and a 'wet fart of a GPU.' I had guessed the 5060 was headed for the same fate after seeing how reviewers handled the 5080, which similarly showcased how little Nvidia's hardware has improved year over year and relied on software to make up the gaps. But Nvidia had other plans. Here are the tactics that Nvidia reportedly just used to throw us off the 5060's true scent, as individually described by GamersNexus, VideoCardz, Hardware Unboxed, Digital Foundry, and more: Nvidia decided to launch its RTX 5060 on May 19th, when most reviewers would be at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, rather than at their test beds at home. Even if reviewers already had a GPU in hand before then, Nvidia cut off most reviewers' ability to test the RTX 5060 before May 19th by refusing to provide drivers until the card went on sale. (Gaming GPUs don't really work without them.) And yet Nvidia allowed specific, cherry-picked reviewers to have early drivers anyhow if they agreed to a borderline unethical deal: they could only test five specific games, at 1080p resolution, with fixed graphics settings, against two weaker GPUs (the 3060 and 2060 Super) where the new card would be sure to win. In some cases, Nvidia threatened to withhold future access unless reviewers published apples-to-oranges benchmark charts showing how the RTX 5060's 'fake frames' MFG tech can produce more frames than earlier GPUs without it. Some reviewers apparently took Nvidia up on that proposition, leading to early reviews where charts looked positively stacked in the 5060's favor: But the reality, according to reviews that have since hit the web, is that the RTX 5060 often fails to beat a four-year-old RTX 3060 Ti, frequently fails to beat a four-year-old 3070, and can sometimes get upstaged by Intel's cheaper $250 B580. And yet, the 5060's lackluster improvements are overshadowed by a juicier story: inexplicably, Nvidia decided to threaten GamersNexus' future access over its GPU coverage. Yes, the same GamersNexus that's developed a staunch reputation for defending consumers from predatory behavior, and just last month published a report on 'GPU shrinkflation' that accused Nvidia of misleading marketing. Bad move! In a 22-minute video, GN claims Nvidia threatened to cut off access to Nvidia's cooling and latency experts unless GN agreed to do the thing you see in the charts above — compare cards with fake frames to cards without. GN claims it has the recorded phone conversations to prove it, which are likely legal because Nvidia was recording them too. 'Just to be clear, Nvidia, I am prepared to release them,' GN editor-in-chief Steve Burke threatened. Recording every conversation isn't how companies and reviewers normally operate. There's been a serious breakdown in trust if we find ourselves here! Nvidia is within its rights to withhold access, of course. Nvidia doesn't have to send out graphics cards or grant interviews. It'll only do it if it's good for business. But the unspoken covenant of product reviews is that the press, as a whole, gets a chance to warn the public if a movie, video game, or GPU is not worth their money. It works both ways: the media also gets the chance to warn that a product is so good you might want to line up in advance. That unspoken rule is what Nvidia is trampling here. Nvidia is trampling an unspoken rule On Wednesday, May 14th, I asked Nvidia in a group press briefing: 'Are there not going to be reviews of the RTX 5060 before our readers are able to buy it?' Nvidia didn't deny it. 'Units will be available from May 19th,' was Nvidia GeForce PR boss Ben Berraondo's response, seemingly implying that a lack of early supplies of the GPU, not an underhanded campaign to influence early reviews, would be to blame for the gap. Earlier in the same briefing, Hardwareluxx 's Andreas Schilling wrote a similar question and got a similar answer: 'Could you share your thought on why Nvidia is going to release the driver for RTX 5060 with availability and not giving us the chance to do our reviews prior to this?' Berraondo answered, 'We are focused on delivering a great day-one experience for GeForce RTX 5060 gamers with our Game Ready Driver that will be available to everyone on May 19.' But as GamersNexus and other publications soon revealed, not 'everyone' had to wait until the 19th to start testing. Nvidia didn't respond to repeated requests for comment about the GamersNexus allegations. It wasn't Nvidia's only misleading statement about the card. During that same Wednesday briefing, rather than sharing Nvidia's benchmark charts, GeForce product management director Justin Walker claimed the new GPU would 'let you play your games maxed out at over 100 frames per second,' including demanding titles as Black Myth Wukong at 130fps, Cyberpunk 2077 at 148fps, and Half-Life 2 RTX at 130fps. I laughed when I read the fine print and saw what Nvidia meant by 'maxed out.' It meant a paltry 720p render resolution, DLSS-upscaled to 1080p, with up to three of every four frames imagined by AI — and even then, only when you paired Nvidia's budget $299 GPU with a decidedly not budget $599 AMD CPU, one of the best money can buy. One of Nvidia's other pieces of news from that same briefing was that DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation is available in over 125 games and apps. 'DLSS 4 is the fastest adopted gaming technology in our history,' Walker proclaimed. Does that mean GPU reviewers can no longer ding these graphics cards for marketing features only a handful of game developers bother to use? I thought to myself. But no: as of today, Nvidia's website lists just 29 games with full native support for DLSS Multi Frame-Generation. The only way Nvidia can get to 125 is by counting games where players have to force it through Nvidia's drivers, which doesn't give any indication of adoption by game developers. So now, I'm wondering: where else might Nvidia be trying to pull the wool over our eyes? I can't quite understand why Nvidia would risk fracturing trust the way it did this week. I mean, yes, Nvidia now has fuck-you money from AI, and gaming can feel like an afterthought. Nvidia's networking business is now bigger than gaming, which now represents less than 10 percent of Nvidia's total revenue. The company makes more pure profit from AI in a single quarter than total gaming sales in a year. It's no wonder the GPUs are in short supply at MSRP when their makers are richly rewarded for putting silicon capacity toward AI chips instead. But that feels like a good argument for Nvidia to stop caring whether its gaming GPUs sell, not why it might feel the need to meddle with reviews. If the desktop RTX 5060 doesn't hit sales goals, the company will be more than OK. Nvidia would be less OK if everyone started questioning its integrity. What might help explain this push, though, is Nvidia's seeming need to make its founder's new vision for gaming into a reality. At CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang kicked off a huge debate about 'fake frames' among PC gamers when he suggested they were the future of graphics — effectively, that the idea your game should draw each and every scene 60, 120, or more times per second will seem antiquated. That AI not only can, but should fill in the gaps. It's not so far-fetched an idea: as my colleague Tom Warren noted in January, 'so much of modern gaming is already 'fake,' and it has been for years.' That might be why Nvidia has been so pushy about reviewers adding such comparisons to their reviews. (Nvidia has even bugged us to include MFG results in our AMD reviews, a request we've largely ignored.) But in the end, Huang's claim that the $549 RTX 5070 would deliver $1,599 RTX 4090 performance didn't ring true. The thing about Nvidia's MFG is it needs enough real frames to begin with, or it doesn't feel smooth, and if it already feels smooth, you may not need the extra frames. It's not a silver bullet that can make a 1440p card feel like a 4K card and, according to Dave James with PC Gamer, it isn't enough to make Nvidia's new 1080p card feel like a 1440p one, either. In one of the first real reviews of the RTX 5060, with video examples, James explains: You're not going to be able to use MFG to be able to up the resolution on your low-end RTX 5060 to match your 1440p monitor, even with DLSS running. And you're not going to be able to use MFG to enable you to run at the highest in-game settings, even sometimes at 1080p. The extra latency and low input frame rates either make it a latency spiking nightmare or the AI generated frames end up creating a ton of unpleasant artifacts as you run around whatever gameworld you're in. Meanwhile, HardwareUnboxed published a review that shows the new 5060 may not be that much faster than the old 4060, even at 1080p. They found it 20 percent faster on average across 18 games, and as low as 8 percent faster in Star Wars Outlaws, 9 percent faster in Stalker 2, and 10 percent faster in Black Ops 6. At 1440p, the $250 Intel Arc B580 offered better 1 percent lows and is the superior deal if you can find it at that price. We may never know how many PC gamers bought an RTX 5060 without seeing any such comparisons, because Nvidia kept proper reviews from arriving on time. But in many cases, it won't be too late to return those GPUs. Maybe Nvidia's bad behavior is enough to push us to buy AMD's new card or wait for Intel's next card instead, challenging Nvidia's 90-percent control of the market and, perhaps, bringing some much-needed competition.
Forbes
21-05-2025
- Forbes
AMD Announces Radeon RX 9060 XT And Ryzen Threadripper 9000 CPUs
AMD's Radeon RX 9060 XT AMD has made significant announcements at the Computex trade show in Taiwan this today, revealing concrete details of its highly-anticipated budget-conscious Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card for gamers, and also a new generation of Ryzen Threadripper processors. Starting with the Radeon RX 9600 XT, AMD has revealed the specifications of the new graphics card, which is set to sit beneath the existing RX 9070 and its launch price of $549 and the RX 9070 XT at $599. Early suggestions are that the card is likely to be priced between $300 and $500 depending on the chosen memory capacity. The capacity itself is either 8GB or 16GB of video memory, in a similar move to Nvidia with its RTX 5060. The latter, though, has not been met with favorable reviews. In fact, PC Gamer said it best in its review of the RTX 5060 and in its own words, things don't look great, with inconsistent performance and Nvidia's would be silver bullet, Multi Frame Generation, at the heart of its problems. By contrast, AMD has enjoyed sales up to 10 times higher with its RX 9070 XT and according to some retailers, even outselling equivalent Nvidia RTX 50-series models and it's hoped the RX 9060 XT 8GB and 16GB will offer yet more compelling reasons to shun Nvidia and steal market share. AMD has revealed specifications of its Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card, which will have 8GB and 16GB ... More memory options Comparing the RX 9060 and 9070 series cards above and below we can see that the RX 9070 XT has double the AMD RDNA 4 compute units, RT accelerators and AI accelerators and offers nearly double the AI TOPS too. If you're worried about power consumption, then the maximum board power is just 182W, but can be as low as 150W and combined with a standard 8-pin connector, older and less capable power supplies should handle it fine. AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT and 9070 both have 16GB of memory, support PCIe 5 and have board powers of ... More 300W or less Sadly there's no word on pricing, performance or availability, but the company will be making further announcements this week and in the near future so watch this space. AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 9000 The second announcement is that of new Zen-5 based Ryzen Threadripper CPUs. There are Pro models, aimed squarely at workstations and professional users, but AMD is classing the standard Threadripper 9000 models as high-end desktop. Whether that is accurate or not depends on the price of both processors, as the previous generation certainly didn't appeal to desktop users as much as the first few generations as they had a far higher platform cost. AMD has announced three new Threadripper 9000 CPUs Three new models will be available, with no core count increases compared to the previous non-Pro models. The maximum core count is 64 for the 9980X, 32 for the 9970X and 24 for the 9960X. However, all four CPUs offer peak boost frequencies up to 5.4GHz and use the same Zen 5 architecture as the company's current Ryzen 9000 CPUs such as the Ryzen 9 9950X, which has 16 cores. Pricing and availability are yet to be announced.
WIRED
19-05-2025
- Business
- WIRED
The Sequel to Nvidia's Most Popular GPU Hits Shelves Today—With No Reviews
May 19, 2025 12:00 PM Nvidia wants you to buy the RTX 5060, but it hasn't given reviewers a chance to test them. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Nvidia's RTX 4060 is the most popular graphics card as of April 2025, according to Steam's Hardware Survey. Now there's finally a successor, the RTX 5060, rounding out the 50-series graphics cards that the company has been releasing since their debut at CES 2025. The 5060 was announced at Computex, a trade show in Taiwan, alongside the laptop version, which are immediately available to purchase today. All of that should be reason to be excited, especially since we've been waiting years for midrange gaming laptops to receive a meaningful bump in GPU performance. The only problem? Nvidia apparently wants you to buy this new GPU and laptops without letting reviewers test them first. The RTX 5060 Arrives It's been around a month since the RTX 5060 Ti launched, and now Nvidia has followed it up with the RTX 5060, rounding out the lineup on the low-end graphics cards. There's a lot we still don't know about the RTX 5060, including specs like clock speed or the actual CUDA core counts. All of that will have to wait, along with real testing, even though you can buy this cards starting today. The RTX 5060 keeps the same pricing as last generation's RTX 4060. There was a price decrease for the RTX 5060 Ti, but Nvidia has kept things steady here, as well as the 8 GB of VRAM. Video random-access memory stores graphics data for the graphics card and boosts performance, and is increasingly an important spec for playing modern AAA games. Maintaining supply has been a consistent problem for the rest of the RTX 50-series, inflating prices way beyond where they should be. For the RTX 5060, Nvidia says it's expecting a 'good supply' of these cards, but we'll have to wait and see how that plays out. In general, these lower-tier cards aren't affected as much by the scalper market, so they should be easier to get hold of. Like with the RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, 5070, and 5060 Ti, the primary selling points of the RTX 5060 is the DLSS 4 and a feature called Multi-Frame Generation. Standard frame generation lets AI create an artificial frame between other frames, allowing for much higher frame rates, which was introduced in DLSS 3.5. With DLSS 4, though, that's expanded to 2X, 3X, or 4X frame generation, pushing frame rates even higher. As you'll notice in the table above, the RTX 5060 includes a lot more AI power in the form of Tensor Cores to power these AI capabilities. Multi-Frame Generation, however, is not a feature I've been particularly impressed with, though, as the implementation has been sloppy. Nvidia has been overriding the feature into games through the Nvidia app, and relatively very few games support the feature natively. While the higher frame rates are impressive on paper, the larger problem is that the more artificial frames you add, the more input lag becomes an issue. None of that is exclusive to the RTX 5060. As for this GPU in particular, Nvidia says you'll see a 20 percent performance improvement over the RTX 4060 without the aid of AI trickery. If that turns out to be true, that'll be a decent uplift over the popular GPU from 2023, especially since there isn't much competition on the market outside of Intel's Arc B580. New Gaming Laptops Along with the new desktop card, several other companies have launched new gaming laptops with the RTX 5060. Most notably, Razer announced the refreshed Blade 14, the company's hybrid laptop aimed at MacBook owners and content creators, plus gamers. The new model is thinner than before, at 0.62 inch thick and 3.59 pounds, which is 11 percent more portable than its predecessor. It has an upgraded 3K OLED display with a 120-Hz refresh rate, as well as a new six-speaker audio system. The RTX 5060 configurations start at $2,299 and will be available this month, also packing the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365. Nvidia says laptops with the RTX 5060 will start at $1,099, though I haven't seen any laptops yet that hit that price just yet. But again, no reviews were provided for any of these new GPUs or laptops, meaning for now we're just going to have to take Nvidia's word for it.
The Verge
06-05-2025
- Business
- The Verge
Nvidia will release its RTX 5060 on May 19th
Nvidia has announced a May 19th release date for its $299 RTX 5060 graphics card and the first laptops, which start at $1,099, that will feature it. The company says they'll be available to buy from retail partners starting at 9AM PT / 12PM ET. At 3,840 CUDA cores, the RTX 5060 has nearly 800 fewer cores than the 5060 Ti Nvidia released last month and is the most basic of the RTX 50-series. But like the Ti version, the 5060 has GDDR7 memory, supports DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, and gets the latest ray tracing and tensor cores. The company says more games are being updated with support for DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation before the 5060 launches, including MechWarrior 5: Clans on May 7th and New World: Aeternum on May 13th. Whether the card is worth picking up, though, is another story. The RTX 5060 is limited to just 8GB of VRAM, and chances are good it'll cost more than its suggested $299 retail price. Retailers started selling GPUs, including the other RTX 50-series cards, at a premium even before President Trump's tariffs took hold. And as The Verge 's Sean Hollister noted recently, Trump's removal of the de minimus exemption last week could also impact pricing via extra import taxes on shipments valued at or under $800.
