We now understand why AMD needs the alleged RX 9070 GRE to take on Nvidia

rx 6900 xt — AMD RX 6900 XT reference card

For a while now, we have known that AMD will be launching the RX 9060 series cards, and they are expected to land in Q2 of this year. Well, we have just entered that quarter, and now we have our first leak of the RX 9060 XT. Some of the purported specifications of the GPU are out courtesy of VideoCardz.

According to the report, AMD's 9060 series will be based on the Navi 44 XT die and will have exactly half the number of stream processors (SPs) or compute units (CUs) as that of the Navi 48 XT-based 9070 series. The 9070 XT packed 4096 SPs or 64 CUs, and hence, the 9060 XT will allegedly have 32 CUs or 2048 SPs.

The rest of the specifications are also expected to be halved, and thus, the memory configuration will comprise 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM across a 128-bit wide memory interface. This will reduce the memory bandwidth from 640 GB/s on the 9070 XT down to 320 GB/s on the 9060 XT.

Using this, we guesstimated the performance of the RX 9060 XT using the data from our gaming review of the 9070 XT and the leaked 3DMark review scores of the RTX 5060 Ti.

Keep in mind that the performance of the RX 9060 XT shown above is pure speculation, as the specifications of the card are not confirmed. Regardless, we essentially halved the performance of our 9070 XT in 3DMark Steel Nomad and Speed Way, the most modern benchmarks in the 3DMark gaming suite, and arrived at the figures seen above.

This is assuming perfect scaling, but it should still give us a fairly decent idea of where the RX 9060 XT's performance should land.

As you can see, the hypothetical 9060 XT should be close to the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti in rasterization performance, as the two of them almost match each other in Steel Nomad (DX 12). However, in Speed Way, the Nvidia GPU shows a 29.4% lead, thus explaining why AMD is apparently working on the new RX 9070 GRE product.

With the GRE, AMD likely wants to offer similar levels of ray tracing performance and better rasterization output than the 5060 Ti, something which it is also doing with its RX 9070 non-XT vs the 5070.

Source: VideoCardz