AMD (allegedly) tried to block RX 9050 reviews – Now we know why
Hardware Unboxed releases the first, and possibly only, Radeon RX 9050 GPU review
Hardware Unboxed has released its review of AMD’s Radeon RX 9050 graphics card, alleging that AMD has told its partners not to sample this product to reviewers. In their review video, Hardware Unboxed said they needed to use “side channels” to access their RX 9050 and couldn’t show the GPU during the review. As a result, it is unknown what brand made this RX 9050 GPU or where it was sourced.
AMD’s RX 9050 is AMD’s lowest-end Radeon RX 9000 series (RDNA 4) graphics card. The GPU is a heavily cut-down version of AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT, with lower clock speeds and half as many available Compute Units (CUs). The tested GPU has 8GB of GDDR6 memory, the same as AMD’s lower-end RX 9060 XT models. As expected, AMD’s new GPU delivers performance levels far below AMD’s other RDNA 4 graphics cards.
(10-game average performance – Hardware Unboxed Review)
Gaming Performance
On average, AMD’s RX 9050 delivers performance between AMD’s RX 6600 and RX 6650 XT at 1080p. This places AMD’s new GPU below Nvidia’s RTX 5050 and Nvidia’s ageing RTX 3060. Overall, it can only deliver around 57% of the performance of AMD’s RX 9060 XT 8GB, or 55% of AMD’s RX 9060 XT 16GB at 1080p.
At 1440p, AMD’s RX 9050 achieves performance levels similar to Nvidia’s RTX 5050, but it still lags behind Nvidia’s RTX 3060. With an average framerate of 33% at 1440p across Hardware Unboxed’s tests, this GPU doesn’t come close to playable PC performance. Gamers will need to lower game settings drastically to achieve higher framerates. For some games, this may not even be possible at 1440p.
(10-game average performance – Hardware Unboxed Review)
Radeon E-Waste
Hardware Unboxed calls AMD’s Radeon RX 9050 $280 Radeon E-Waste in the thumbnail of its review. The GPU isn’t as performant as older AMD low-end GPU models, and its price is much higher than most gamers would expect for a low-end GPU. While VRAM is expensive right now, this GPU is hard for consumers to accept. As such, Hardware Unboxed recommends saving up for a higher-end GPU or buying an alternative GPU on the used market.
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