It’s not exactly a surprise, but the Radeon RX 9050 is a bit of a letdown.
We mentioned this just a few days ago: AMD plans to expand its lineup of RDNA 4-based graphics cards with the upcoming release of a Radeon RX 9050. Now officially announced by AMD, the card in question is based on the same GPU—the Navi 44—as the Radeon RX 9060, though with a few additional limitations: the GPU now has only 16 compute units, 1,024 stream processors, 16 ray accelerators, and 32 AI accelerators. By way of comparison, the Navi 44 used in the Radeon RX 9060 has 1,792 stream processors, which should give you a rough idea of the gap between the two cards.
A photo of ASRock’s Challenger Radeon RX 9050 model. © VideoCardz
However, the Radeon RX 9050 is unlikely to be available to everyone, as AMD appears to be targeting only the Asia-Pacific, Latin American, and Japanese markets. In fact, the first review we’ve seen comes from Japan. The website Hermitage Akihabara appears to have already gotten its hands on this entry-level card, which has a suggested retail price of $279. At the time of the announcement, there was talk of a 4GB version in addition to the 8GB model, but Hermitage Akihabara only had access to the 8GB version—which, strangely enough, it compared only to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5050. That’s a shame—we would have liked to verify the performance gap mentioned earlier compared to the Radeon RX 9060.
VideoCardz has compiled all the performance benchmarks for the Radeon RX 9050. © VideoCardz
That said, the gap between the Radeon RX 9050 and the GeForce RTX 5050 already seems significant. The Japanese site uses a testing protocol that doesn’t fully align with our standards, yielding some surprising results—notably in DOOM: The Dark Ages —but since this is the only test available at the moment, we’ll have to make do with it. In 3DMark, we note that the ray-tracing scenes are more demanding than the others: 10.1% on TimeSpy Extreme and 13% on Steel Nomad, but 25.7% on Speed Way and 26.7% on Port Royal, with the GeForce RTX 5050 outperforming the Radeon RX 9050 in each case. In games, the gap is often more pronounced: 42.7% to 60.9% in *Assassin’s Creed Black Flag* or 29.8% to 47.6% in *Cyberpunk 2077*. On average, according to VideoCardz’s calculations, the performance gap is around 30% between the two cards, while the Radeon RX 9050 consumes only 10.6% less power than the GeForce RTX 5050 (70.5 W vs. 78.9 W). Unless you’re really looking for the absolute lowest price, the choice seems pretty clear…
