AMD Confirms RX 9050 4GB—But It’s OEM Only
AMD has confirmed the RX 9050 4GB GPU is indeed real, after it briefly appeared online only a few days ago. As TechPowerUp reports, AMD isn’t looking to sell it to DIY buyers; instead, it will only sell to OEMs like Dell, HP, iBuyPower, and similar companies to include in their pre-built gaming systems.
That doesn’t make the card any better, though, and now it’s going to end up being sold to unsuspecting gamers wanting an affordable entry-level system. It’s already appeared in one CyberPowerPC system on Best Buy. Paired with an AMD Ryzen 5 5500 and just 8GB of DDR4 RAM, it’s still selling for just under $900.
The RX 9050 4GB is a severely underpowered card. With just 16 compute units, it only has 1,024 shader units. At just 4GB of GDDR6, too, its memory bus is a mere 64-bit, delivering a measly 144GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Assuming you can get modern games to run with 4GB of VRAM—many need close to 8GB for even stable 1080p gameplay—the performance is likely to be extremely poor, and futureproofing is all but nonexistent.
You could argue that just getting an RDNA 4 card is the important part. It unlocks FSR 4.1 upscaling and AMD frame generation, but the latter uses up VRAM and may actually make the problem worse. Not to mention you need a decent native frame rate to really take advantage of frame gen.
All of this makes the inclusion of these cards inside “gaming PCs” a real minefield for potential buyers. At $900, that CyberPowerPC system seems like a decent-enough deal on the surface. It looks the part of a gaming PC, and it has a graphics card from the latest generation.
But that card is severely underpowered. So is the CPU, and it’s from a six-year-old architecture. There’s also very little upgrade path beyond the extremely popular and overpriced Zen 3 X3D models. A mere 8GB of DDR4 is going to severely hamstring overall performance—though at least that’s more easily upgradeable.
Friends don’t let friends buy gaming PCs with weak graphics cards. Keep an eye out for your pals.
