From PC World: You thought a Sophie’s Choice between ruinously expensive or embarrassingly underpowered laptops was as bad as the RAM crunch would get? Nope. It looks like we’re about to go backwards for graphics cards, too. A brand new AMD Radeon card has just been announced and… oof. Some variants appearing in pre-built PCs will start with just 4GB of GDDR6 memory.
AMD has officially announced the Radeon RX 9050 after a day or so of leaks and, if you look on the official spec page, it says that the Navi 44-based card (a shared platform with the 9060 and 9060 XT) has a “Max Memory Size” of 8GB. But ASRock’s spec page for its own version of the card comes in two flavors, 4GB and 8GB. So which one will you actually be seeing?
I asked an AMD representative to clarify the discrepancy between the 8GB spec on AMD’s website and ASRock’s listing. They said the 4GB variant of the card (which also cuts the memory bus in half versus the 8GB version, halving overall bandwidth) is a “system-only variant, not intended to be sold out of the pre-built system.” So you won’t see that 4GB card on store shelves or in GPU-only online listings, only in pre-built (presumably budget) gaming desktop PCs.
The RX 9050 8GB card is set at a $279 USD introductory price, but for the initial release it will only be available in the Latin American and APJ (Asia-Pacific and Japan) markets. Plans for releases in other markets weren’t shared.
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