AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT
Published:
I bought a new graphics card.
I have been using an AMD RX 6600 for a bit longer than three years, and been quite satisfied with it. However, with the looming RAM shortage and AI, like a voracious parasite, sucking blood out of the semiconductor industry I decided to pull the trigger on a new GPU.
The card I bought is a Sapphire PULSE model of the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT card with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM. There is a version of this card with 8GB, but my old RX 6600 had the same amount of memory, so buying that version would not make much sense. Of course, I would probably get more performance out of the card, but I do not actually need the top-end card (that is why I could get away with running an RX 6600 in the first place); the main excuse for the upgrade was to get more VRAM.
I checked my most important scenarios, which are:
- running the system in text mode
- running the system in graphical mode under Wayland using Sway
- playing World of Warcraft Classic
- playing Titan Quest II
The temperature in my office/workshop was probably around 18℃.
Running in text mode
The card draws about 5 W, sits at roughly 25℃ with fans not spinning at all. This is the exact same behaviour that the RX 6600 had, and I like it—the card just quietly sits there outputting signal to the monitor.
Running in graphical mode
The card draws about 9 W, sits at roughly 35℃ with fans not spinning at all. Same as with text mode, this is not much different to how the RX 6600 behaved, but the RX 9060 XT does draw about 1⁄3 more power in this scenario: Firefox running in background, and plenty of foot windows open. (Which is the main use-case for graphical mode: having more terminals open and being able to fit more text on screen is nice.)
World of Warcraft Classic Era
The card draws about 35 W, and keeps quiet. I run WoW in 4K, with 100% render scale (no upscaling, only organic free-range pixels), and all settings maxed-out. Same as the 6600, 9060 is able to output a stable 60 FPS with almost no jitter. I limited the FPS to 60 in game settings, because my monitor is only able to run at 60 Hz.
Titan Quest II
The card draws about 140 W, but is able to run the game (which is built on Unreal Engine 5, infamous for "interesting" performance characteristics) at stable 60 FPS, at native 4K resolution with all graphics settings at "high".
In my opinion, the RX 9060 XT delivers excellent results. It is sips power when idle and does not get greedy under light workloads, but can deliver an appropriate amount of oomph (with power usage to match) when the situation calls for it.
A worthy successor to my trusty not-so-ol' RX 6600.
Caveat: PCIe revision
My PC is built around a Threadripper 2950x which is a PCIe 3.0 platform, while the RX 9060 XT is a PCIe 5.0 card. So even though what I get out of the GPU is entirely to my satisfaction, I could, in theory, get even more out of it if I used a PCIe 5.0 system. However, such a wholesale upgrade would hurt my wallet to the tune of €3500 (if I were to build the PC around Threadripper 9970x and I do not see a reason to spend that much if the 2950x is still running strong and delivers more than acceptable performance in all the workloads that matter to me.
It is tempting, though.
Next: RAM prices; or, on the suckage of being a regular person
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