About a week ago, we reviewed the six-year development of the Nvidia GeForce 60 series graphics cards – a mainstream product line that has long defined the performance most players can expect at the $300 price point. This review ultimately leads us to the all-new RTX 5060, which in many ways is Nvidia's most attractive upgrade since the RTX 2060 was released in early 2019. However, like many advances in the field of science and technology, this improvement is accompanied by some issues that cannot be ignored.

What is the good news? The RTX 5060 has indeed brought a tangible cross-generational performance leap. What is the bad news? It only comes with 8GB of video memory. In 2025, this is hard to ignore. At a price of $300, it is far from an undisputed first choice. As we pointed out in our performance test analysis, it is no surprise that AMD has almost no competitive products at this price point, resulting in the current market structure.

So the question is - what has AMD done in this positioning?

Let's turn the time back five years ago. In 2020, the Radeon RX 5600 XT will be available for $280. It is not a stunning work, but it is quite reasonable. Our review summary at that time was very clear: "The Radeon RX 5600 XT is a product worthy of recognition, which has driven the price drop and performance improvement in the $300 price range. With this alone, we should be sure of it. This graphics card may not surprise you, but its cost-effectiveness is better than the RX 5700, and it also makes the RTX 2060 Super difficult to recommend. Given the competitive environment in this price range, we think AMD is doing a good job."

In other words: not outstanding, but "okay".

A year later, we welcomed the $330 Radeon RX 6600, and this time, AMD fell through. We ended that review, "Back to the performance of the RX 6600 itself. In a normal market environment, this product is undoubtedly disappointing. The price is about 20% higher than the 5600 XT 20 months ago, while the performance at 1440p is only about 6%. Ultimately, the RX 6600, like its XT version, is a product that lacks highlights, only because of the market conditions at that time."

Ironically, the Radeon RX 6600 eventually became a successful product for AMD, precisely because AMD significantly lowered its price after the cryptocurrency mining boom faded. Some graphics cards are even sold for less than $200 – more than 40% lower than the starting price. At this price point, the RX 6600 shows extremely high cost performance and is completely worth recommending.

Next is the Radeon RX 7600 released in mid-2023. AMD lowered the price from $300 to $270 before launch, but the results remained disappointing. Our conclusion is: "We cannot recommend buying the RX 7600 for a $270 starter. The experience it offers is not enough to support this pricing, especially given that the same price can be purchased at the end of last year's end of last year."

Now, we're welcome to the Radeon RX 9060 XT, which comes in two versions: a good version and a bad version. In this test, we focused on the 8GB version, which fell within the $300 price range that AMD has long insisted on. At the same time, the 8GB version of RX 9060 XT is also directly benchmarked against the $300 GeForce RTX 5060, so it is obviously unfair to introduce a 16GB version in this comparison. Sorry, AMD fans, but we have to be consistent.

Based on this premise, today we compare four Radeon graphics cards horizontally: RX 5600 XT, RX 6600, RX 7600 and RX 9060 XT 8GB. We tested two image quality presets for each game at 1080p and 1440p resolutions, aiming to fully understand the evolution of AMD's mainstream graphics card product line over the years.

Next, let's see the test results...

Performance Testing

Rainbow Six: Siege X

The first test was the medium-quality setting of "Rainbow Six: Siege", and the results showed a unique distribution. The RX 6600 performed mediocrely at launch, and this test just showed why - it only barely performs with the RX 5600 XT. The performance of the RX 6600 is so sluggish that the RX 7600 looks good, which achieved a 33-35% performance improvement in this scenario.

So how does the 8GB version of RX 9060 XT perform? Here, it achieves a performance improvement of about 58% in both resolutions compared to the RX 7600. Such a huge cross-generational advancement should be exciting, but the reality of just 8GB of video memory is hard to really excite – after all, this product is facing challenges now, and we expect these problems to become more serious in the coming years. Still, in this test, the 9060 XT 8GB beat the RX 7600, becoming the most powerful product AMD has launched at the $300 price point in at least the last five years.

After switching to the "Ultra" image quality preset, the results are still similar. The RX 6600 is roughly the same as the 5600 XT, and this price has not brought any new ideas or even a slight regression. Skip the RX 6600, the RX 7600 is 26–29% faster than the 5600 XT, which seems good, but don't forget it was released a full three years later than the former.

Let’s look at the RX 9060 XT 8GB again, which is 62% faster than the RX 7600 at 1080p and 49% faster than the RX 7600 at 1440p. The improvement at 1440p is smaller, probably because the memory bandwidth has not increased significantly, which has only increased by 11%.

Horizon: Dawn of Zero Remake

Next we tested the medium quality of "Horizon: Zero Dawn Remake". Compared with "Rainbow Six", the performance improvement here is more stable. The RX 6600 is 8–14% faster than the 5600 XT, and the improvement is still disappointing. The RX 7600 is 20–23% faster than the RX 6600. Although there is some improvement, it is hard to say that the 6600 itself has weak performance.

When it's the RX 9060 XT 8GB turn, it's 50–57% faster than the RX 7600, a huge cross-generation leap rare in the Radeon series in recent years.

These results are somewhat unexpected, but we can explain why: the key lies in video memory and PCIe bandwidth. Under the "Very High" preset, this game requires more than 8GB of video memory even at 1080p, and the usage often exceeds 11GB.

So why does the RX 9060 XT 8GB perform so well here? There are two reasons. First, other graphics cards are limited to PCIe 4.0, while the 9060 XT uses PCIe 5.0 and enables all 16 channels, with a total bandwidth of up to 128 GB/s.

By comparison, the RX 6600 and RX 7600 have only 32 GB/s bandwidth—four times less than the 9060 XT. Although the RX 5600 XT also uses PCIe 4.0 full 16 channels (64 GB/s), it only has 6GB of video memory, so the situation is similar to that of 6600/7600.

This means that although the 9060 XT 8GB also faces insufficient video memory during this test, higher PCIe bandwidth effectively alleviates performance losses. Although it still has a performance decline compared to the 16GB version, it is far less serious than if it only uses 8 channels or the PCIe 4.0 standard.

It should be noted that if the 9060 XT is used for the PCIe 3.0 platform, its performance will drop to close to the RX 6600 and RX 760

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