Gamers and game developers alike are now largely settled on 8GB of VRAM being the baseline expectation for a gaming GPU in 2026, and that’s further reinforced by the latest Steam hardware survey, which shows 16GB of VRAM to now be the most common graphics card configuration.
That hasn’t stopped AMD from releasing a 4GB OEM-only GPU within its gaming-oriented lineup of RX 9000 series GPUs, which it has just confirmed the final details on.
AMD revealed the RX 9050 GPU earlier this year, and it became the most affordable option within the RX 9000 lineup, with consumers in some regions already able to purchase a unit with an 8GB VRAM configuration for a retail price of under $300. That seems like a great price on paper, but initial impressions of this card from publications such as TechSpot haven’t been brilliant – and now AMD has confirmed the exact specifications for the 4GB card.
As shown on the new product page, the 4GB variant halves a number of specifications from the standard RX 9050. The memory bandwidth has been slashed from 128-bit to 64-bit, cutting memory bandwidth from 288GB per second to 144GB per second, while AMD’s ‘Infinity Cache’ is also halved from 32MB to 16MB. The GPU core itself, at least, remains unchanged.
4GB is no longer enough for the latest PC games, many of which now ask for 8GB of VRAM in their system requirements as a minimum. Before this, AMD hadn’t launched a 4GB consumer GPU since 2022’s RX 6500 XT. For Nvidia, you’d have to go back to 2019 to find its most recent 4GB consumer gaming card, the GTX 1650.
The 4GB version of the RX 9050 will only be supplied to OEMs for prebuilt PCs, and won’t be available for consumers to buy directly for their own builds (unlike the 8GB variant). The question that raises though, given the card’s naming within the gaming-focused RX 9000 lineup, is who is this card actually designed for?
