AMD Confirms Radeon RX 9050 4 GB Has Smaller Infinity Cache, Lower Memory Bandwidth

AMD has updated its documentation page for the late-July launch of the Radeon RX 9050 graphics cards, which include two models: one with 4 GB and another with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. Both cards feature 1,024 Streaming Processors across 16 Compute Units and can boost up to a 2.6 GHz clock speed. However, the lower-end GPU has only 4 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 64-bit bus, resulting in a memory bandwidth of 144 GB/s, which is significantly lower than the 8 GB version. The 8 GB version of the Radeon RX 9050 uses 8 GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus, providing a memory bandwidth of 288 GB/s, doubling the throughput.

Another difference lies in the Infinity Cache within each GPU die. The 8 GB edition has 32 MB of Infinity Cache, while the 4 GB edition has only 16 MB. Initially, the listing for the 4 GB edition did not reveal the difference in Infinity Cache size, but AMD's documentation confirms it. Naturally, this will result in some performance differences, as larger cache buffers tend to improve performance significantly.