AMD has launched a new graphics card, the RX 9050. This is an entry-level graphics card with a slim provision of cores and VRAM, more of a match for the 890M than the RX 9060. It’s even more entry-level than initial rumours suggested, and while you’d hope for a great price to match, we’re not getting our hopes up yet.

Take a look at the specifications below, right from AMD’s website, and you’ll get an idea of the card. It’s using the same Navi 44 GPU as the more capable entry-level and mid-range graphics cards, but it’s been trimmed down to within an inch of its life. At 1,024 cores, it is actually a match for the 890M GPU found in Strix Point mobile chips, though it does have the big benefit of a desktop power budget, even if only 92 watts; RDNA 4 architecture, and 32 MB of Infinity Cache.

Compared to previous rumours, which my colleague Jacob Fox called “quite strange” when we published a story about them in May, it’s a lot less capable than expected. Look to the TFLOPs for a more holistic view of what’s going on, and the RX 9050 is actually rated to half the performance of the RX 9060. Bear in mind, TFLOPs does not directly correlate to game performance, but it’s a general idea of what to expect.

It’s tough to judge a graphics card without knowing the price. ASRock is the only partner to announce availability for the RX 9050, launching its own RX 9050 Challenger 8 GB card. There’s no clear price for the card yet and it’s set to launch only in LATAM and Asia Pacific.

The card may end up being more OEM-only elsewhere. The RX 9060 is OEM-only. Only Best Buy has the card for sale so far, inside a CyberPower gaming PC for $890. This includes an RX 9050 4 GB among its shoestring specification.

Yeah, 4 GB.

What’s that about? The AMD website only lists an 8 GB model, though that listing is only talking about a “Max Memory Size” of 8 GB, while earlier rumours had suggested a 4 GB model would be part of the range. ASRock also only talks about an 8 GB model.

So is this CyberPower listing incorrect? I’d love to think so, but it may well be the case that there’s an even slimmer 4 GB model for OEMs. If that’s the case, it’s no surprise then that AMD isn’t shouting about it to the world. That’s a pitiful amount of memory for 2026—AMD actually rallied against 4 GB cards back in 2022.

“Competitive products at a similar entry level price-point are offering up to a maximum of 4GB of VRAM, which is evidently not enough for today’s games,” AMD said in a blog post. “Go Beyond 4GB of Video Memory to Crank Up your settings. Play on Radeon RX Series GPUs with 6GB or 8GB of VRAM and enjoy gaming at Max settings.”

Let’s just hope this 4 GB thing is a typo and any plans to release such a card have been brushed aside.

With the RDNA 4 architecture under the hood, the RX 9060 will at least have some benefits over older cards. The full FSR Redstone feature set is supported by RDNA 4, including Frame Generation and Ray Regeneration. Though we tend to find frame generation works best when the card is able to deliver a good amount of frames to begin with, which this card may struggle to do in the latest games. At least FSR 4 is natively supported, including FP8. This card might need it.

Update

AMD has sent over the following information regarding the new card, including the price and availability for the card.

The driver also includes support for the new AMD Radeon™ RX 9050 graphics card, which expands the Radeon™ RX 9000 Series portfolio with an affordable option that brings the latest AMD RDNA™ 4 gaming technologies to mainstream gamers in the APJ and Latin American markets at a SEP of $279 USD.

The Radeon RX 9050 is designed for responsive gameplay at 1080p in popular esports and modern AAA titles. This highly efficient, drop-in upgrade features a 92W TBP and fully supports the latest AMD FSR Technologies, next-gen raytracing, and high-quality AV1 video streaming.

Radeon RX 9050 key specs:

Architecture: AMD RDNA 4

Compute Units: 16

VRAM: 8GB GDDR6

Game Clock / Boost Clock: 1.92 GHz / Up to 2.60 GHz

TBP: 92W

To learn more about the Radeon RX 9050 GPU, and the Radeon RX 9000 Series graphics cards, click here.

I’ve not tested the card but I’d take a guess as to say that’s a steep price tag for the expected performance. Especially compared to the Arc B570/B580 and GeForce RTX 5050. The RTX 5050 comes with 33% fewer cores than the RTX 5060, whereas the RX 9050 has 42% fewer cores to the RX 9060. It’s half that of an RX 9060 XT—it’s not half price, though.

This info also suggests it’s not ASRock that’s limiting this card to Asia Pacific and Latin America. AMD is doing the same.

There’s also news on whether there’s a 4 GB version. Hassan Mujtaba from WCCFTech says on X that they spoke to AMD and confirmed the 4 GB version is real and OEM-only. There are no plans to sell it outside of OEM systems.