A hot potato: Soon after AMD defended GPUs with 8GB of VRAM by claiming most gamers play esports that don’t require more memory, the company has explained why it sent out so few Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GB cards to reviewers. Apparently, it’s due to “regional market demand.”
There has been a slew of controversy over Nvidia’s and AMD’s recent 8GB cards. It’s accepted that this amount of VRAM is woefully insufficient for most modern games, which is why Nvidia told reviewers not to compare the RTX 5060 to the RTX 4060 and to turn on 4x multi-frame generation to essentially inflate FPS results.
The 16GB version of AMD’s Radeon 9060 XT, which we really like and gave a score of 85, was sent to plenty of mainstream reviewers. But the same can’t be said for the 8GB version – only a handful were sent out before launch, mostly to smaller outlets.
This has led to speculation that, like Nvidia, AMD didn’t want the 8GB model of the Radeon 9060 XT to have a lot of (negative) publicity.
According to official AMD guidelines revealed by Linus Tech Tips, AMD said it enabled global reviews of both 16GB and 8GB models of the Radeon RX 9060 XT based on regional market demand.
“So in short, yes, there are some other global publications that are receiving 8GB models for testing,” the company explained.
In late May, AMD’s Frank Azor wrote that the majority of gamers still play at 1080p and that worldwide, the most popular genre of game is esports. Therefore, 8GB is enough for most people. The latest Steam survey supports the first part of his statement – 1080p remains the most popular resolution among participants, with more than half of them playing at Full-HD.
Majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p and have no use for more than 8GB of memory. Most played games WW are mostly esports games. We wouldn’t build it if there wasn’t a market for it. If 8GB isn’t right for you then there’s 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory…
– Frank Azor (@AzorFrank) May 22, 2025
Nvidia has also made similar claims about 8GB being mostly for non-Western markets, especially Asia. However, one has to wonder why the companies never rolled out these excuses in the past.
We said the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, the reviews of which Nvidia successfully delayed, was instantly obsolete due to its stingy amount of VRAM and $379 MSRP. We also disputed Azor’s claim that these 8GB cards are meant for 1080p gaming.
As for the RX 9060 XT 8GB, we note that buying one over the 16GB version is effectively just throwing away money – you’re saving just $50 at the cost of a huge performance drop.
