You thought a Sophie’s Choice between ruinously expensive or embarrassingly underpowered laptops was as bad as the RAM crunch would get? Nope. It looks like we’re about to go backwards for graphics cards, too. A brand new AMD Radeon card has just been announced and… oof. Some variants appearing in pre-built PCs will start with just 4GB of GDDR6 memory.
AMD has officially announced the Radeon RX 9050 after a day or so of leaks and, if you look on the official spec page, it says that the Navi 44-based card (a shared platform with the 9060 and 9060 XT) has a “Max Memory Size” of 8GB. But ASRock’s spec page for its own version of the card comes in two flavors, 4GB and 8GB. So which one will you actually be seeing?
ASRock
I asked an AMD representative to clarify the discrepancy between the 8GB spec on AMD’s website and ASRock’s listing. They said the 4GB variant of the card (which also cuts the memory bus in half versus the 8GB version, halving overall bandwidth) is a “system-only variant, not intended to be sold out of the pre-built system.” So you won’t see that 4GB card on store shelves or in GPU-only online listings, only in pre-built (presumably budget) gaming desktop PCs.
The RX 9050 8GB card is set at a $279 USD introductory price, but for the initial release it will only be available in the Latin American and APJ (Asia-Pacific and Japan) markets. Plans for releases in other markets weren’t shared.
For context, the 9060 is also OEM-only, but the 8GB 9060 XT variant is currently going for a little above the $400 USD mark, though you can find better deals if you dig a little. That card had 8GB of VRAM, the baseline for most PC gamers buying new hardware… and before all this “AI” memory nonsense, we were arguing about whether 8GB was enough in 2025. The RX 9050 is the first AMD desktop card release in almost a full year.
The new card makes compromises elsewhere, too. With 16 compute units, 16 RT cores, 64 texture units, and 1024 stream processors, it’s rocking approximately one quarter the power of the top-end card… which tracks, with one quarter of the memory. According to reporting from the generally reliable Uniko’s Hardware on Twitter, the 4GB version of the card has only a 64-bit memory bus because it’s using half the physical memory, versus the 128-bit version on the 8GB card.
This is pretty dang bad. We haven’t seen a 4GB desktop card from AMD since the RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6400 back in 2022. Nvidia released the GTX 1630 (not even getting the current RTX designation) in the same year, ditto for Intel’s Arc 3 A370M. It’s hard to see the release of this card, at this time, as anything but a big step backwards even if it’s limited to pre-built systems at the moment.
