I know, I know we’re all hopped up about the RX 9070 XT and 9070 launch — I know I am. But looking beyond the potential big win AMD is on for with its first RDNA4 graphics cards, I’m also particularly excited about the potential for the rumored 9060 XT. Not because it’ll be cheaper again — it will be — but because it might have up to 16GB of VRAM. That’s going to wreck Nvidia’s long-term second-hand card market, which could have a much greater impact on AMD’s market share over the long term.

It’s all just rumors for now, and some of my colleagues are much less excited by this than I am, but I think there’s some real potential here for this little card to be a game changer.

Video memory, or VRAM, has been a front-and centre feature of graphics card spec sheets for generations, but it’s started to matter a lot more in recent years. While flagship graphics cards have exploded in their VRAM quantities, with the 5090 now offering 32GB, most mainstream cards have been getting by with less. It was only a couple of generations ago that the flagship RTX 3080 only had 10GB of VRAM, and outside of the top few models, you’ll still see 12GB, 10GB, or even 8GB.

The problem is, this is really not enough any more. Not for the latest games, and not when you enable demanding settings like ray tracing. has been clocked using over 15GB when running at full tilt, 4K, ray tracing, all the beans. Other games aren’t far behind.