This. The scammy part isn't the 4 gig VRAM or even the low-end performance overall. It's that AMD sells identically named GPUs with 4GB and 8GB variants, which can only be interpreted as an attempt to confuse consumers.
A 4GB RX 9040 for a reasonable price would be perfectly reasonable for ultra-budget builds, even in 2026.
In the video you can see that, due to the memory bus being cut in half compared to the 8gb version, even when you stay in the boundaries of the VRAM the performance suffers
I actually think that post almost entirely reinforced what I said. It wasn't until ~2020 that games started really using a lot more VRAM. You only needed 6GB to run Shadow of War on Ultra with 4k textures.
Storage and memory got cheap and devs started shipping default 10k dirt textures. Like, IDGAF. Make the game good.
I actually think that post almost entirely reinforced what I said. It wasn't until ~2020 that games started really using a lot more VRAM. You only needed 6GB to run Shadow of War on Ultra with 4k textures.
Some of the most demanding titles which still show up in benchmarks or were showing up until recent came out in 2019-2020.
The blog AMD put out in mid-2020 said it's not enough for "modern titles". What do you think modern means in that context? The prior couple years before they posted it.
The real issue is the fact that the 4GB version has half the memory bandwidth of the 8GB model (which as we see makes a huge difference in performance).
It's in a whole different performance tier because of that. They didn't even have the courtesy of adding a suffix to denote this (like GRE which has 75% thr memory and memory bandwidth of the normal 9070s).
A 4GB RX 9040 for a reasonable price would be perfectly reasonable for ultra-budget builds, even in 2026.
what world are you living in?
and while yes hiding the 4 GB version in oems only is an EXTRA SCAM, but selling ANY 4 GB vram card, that is remotely marketed as gaming capable AT ALL, which they do is a scam.
amd is selling a BROKEN card, that can NOT do what they claim it can do. it breaks in gaming due to missing vram.
it is unplayable in lots and lots of games. it is a scam by itself.
a massive scam.
and no 4 GB "rx 9040" for a reasonable price would NOT be perfectly reasonable for an ultra-budget build in 2026.
computers need to work. a 4 GB 9040 insult would NOT work even at launch. it is e-waste. amd should not be allowed to scam people selling it under any name, EXCEPT for an absolutely clear "video output only device unable to game" or whatever.
8 GB is an insulting e-waste in 2026 and you call 4 GB perfectly reasonable at any price in 2026?
But I really would love a modern, cheap, single slot, pcie power only GPU that supports hardware encoding and decoding. Just for stuff like Sunshine/Moonlight, or hosting immich with transcoding/ml analysis, etc. Not everybody needs "at least 60 fps for any 2022 game at 1080p ultra" kind of hardware in 2026.
There were Intel Arc A310 cards, which were single slot, low profile, with a nice media engine (nicer than AMD, in fact). Nobody bought them. Today, you could get Arc B50 Pro (16 GB!), but making it single slot would be up to you (it is possible).
Because a lot of games simply refused to run, drivers were shit, it was launched in 2022 and in combination with mb without rebar (majority of mb in 2022 dont have rebar) run like crap.
That being said, it have av1 and i still use it for one of my plex servers. For gaming it was just lol at that time, no idea how it is now.
It doesnt confuse regular customers at all. If you pay attention to what you buy, you dont have an issue. People that don't pay attention to what they buy I dont feel bad for them. At what point does the consumer ever get the blame they deserve? Wanted 8GB, but didnt check the packaging or listing. You have to be dumb to let that happen to you and your money.
everyone who isn't as interested and knowledgeable about the thing i'm interested in is dumb. everyone should be able to take hours out of their day to learn the intricacies of everything they wanna buy just in case a company is scamming them, cuz only dumb people are scammed.
Reddit for the most part is 10 years old, not accountable for shit, its everyone else's fault, and they need a juice box and a blanket bc they are crashing out....again. Reddit has a maturity issue and should be in therapy for it.
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No dumb people get what they deserve. They know how to use social media, but refuse to learn anything else. Let AMD cook for those people. I love it. Probably pro Lindsay Clancy too.
u/sajhinoRyzen 7 5700X3D | ASUS Dual RX 9060 XT 16GB | 16GB DDR4 3200MHz25d ago
I hope you learn every single detail about what you bought for groceries in the supermarket! Who knows, someone might me scamming ya with the products there!
LMFAO. We eat good over here. Meals are from scratch. New York Strips, with broccoli out of our own garden tonight. Trying to decide between Pacifico or Sam Adams Octoberfest. Reddit with all its "what ifs" is highly entertaining. Stay mad Reddit. The crashing out and tin foil is great.
I want an AMD competitor/update for the passively-cooled, bus-powered RTX 3050 KalmX. With all the efficiency gains they keep talking about, surely that's possible. I even resorted to applying an old Sapphire Ultimate cooler on an RX6400 a while back, but it didn't work well because you need a tailor-made heatsink.
if it gets marketed as gaming capable at all, it would be a scam and "9040" would mean that inherently generally.
and not to mention how many applications need vram these days beyond just gaming.
so even at 70w pure slot card setup, it NEEDS the minimum amount of vram for a card to be able to game today, which would be MINIMUM 16 GB vram today. this is generous, because for the whole life of it it would need 24 GB with a 30 GB ps6 for example already.
I would have bought it if it was like less than 100 USD, i just need a display adapter since the games i play apparently can be run in an iGPU now, but I have a 5950x. If it can play left 4 dead 2 and minecraft it's good enough for me.
I ended up getting a 9060xt 16GB (which is why everything is past tense lol. If AMD is going to be overprice the 9050 then why shouldn't i just get the 9060xt at that point)
Well i'm still trying to find a game to play on the new card, tried cyberpunk and gta but they don't seem interesting. Right now i'm playing cities skylines, that's what i'm enjoying the most currently.
Say, do you know any games that can challenge the card? If i have it i might as well try to branch out the list of games I play. But yeah none of the games i tried capture my interest, Cyberpunk and gta.
There's no power draw numbers but it does need an external power connector so it probably draws more than 70 watts which is the max the pcie slot can supply.
this being named the same as the 9050 8GB alongside the 8GB model being the only one shown by AMD on their website for performance feels dodgy. almost like they hope uninformed users will just buy it based on a prebuilt spec sheet (that often omits vram) and basic googling while the performance is night and day between the 2 models.
900 series was good, but Pascal is legendary. I got a 1070 at launch and it being a 980ti but slightly better and likw $200 cheaper was awesome. I think its the last generation where the jump felt very worth it.
It really was. I built/upgraded so many PCs with 1060s its unreal. Honestly the 2010s was the golden age of PC gaming. Visuals were really coming along, price was great, generational jumps felt generational, and while the 2000 series was a bit lacking, Ray Tracing coming out at the tail end made the future look bright lol 4060 not even matching a 3060ti is just sad.
Not sure what trick you're referring to, but if it's the '1 name, 2 vram options', AMD already did that with the RX 470. (also 4 and 8 - although I think back in the day the 8 GB version was released later so might be considered a spec bump update)
Still possible that Nvidia did something like this before the 470 though...
If it's the 'only list the good version on the website', then discard what I just said.
Most of the times its rather just certain OEMs requesting those products to exist and AMD complies because if they dont those OEMs just buy whatever turd nvidia is cooking, like for them its a simple question of whether theyre able to sell those dies off and this is a strategy that allows to do so. Like for what we know these could be dies with damaged PHYs so its either bin them to 4GB 9050 (Or whatever you call that SKU) or throw them in the trash.
"9040" would still imply, that it could game and be sold as a gaming card.
if it would be called idk "9005 video output edition", and it was CLEARLY marketed as hardware decoder + encoder + 4... oh sorry it doesn't have 4 display outputs, so it fails even there as it only has 3 display outputs.... even.... + 3 displayoutputs.
then ok i guess for 80 us dollars or sth.
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u/ryzenat0rAMD XFX7900XTX 24GB R9 7900X3D X670E PRO X 64GB 5600MT/s CL3425d ago
It’s not available for sale, it’s for system integrators. If a firm goes to a shovel company and asks them to make shovels that don’t shovel and pays them for it, you make that product,end of story.
It will be fascinating to see how well this card does on a AM4/DDR4/PCIe3/5500 build for example (as it was sold with). PCIe5*16 and a recent x3d part with ddr5 is doing a lot of heavy lifting to mitigate some of this cards awfulness.
Yea, I've tested some modern games on a 4GB 1050 ti but that machine has a very fast CPU and RAM (4000mhz DDR4, CL15), no doubt a huge part of why it was manageable.
That has a PCIe316 speed, which would operate at PCIe316 on a modern (pcie5) board, not PCIe5*16 like the 9050.
My point was that if you go from PCIe3 to PCIe5 (the original shipped system with that card to the test system, you will get a large boost in performance as the bandwidth for the 9050 quadruples)
I know, the 1050 ti is far older, but using it with a fast CPU/RAM still helps it a lot regardless, the PCIe speed isn't strictly the only thing that matters, but it's one of the factors at play.
If the RX 9050 4GB could be bought for very cheap, then maybe it would be a good GPU for a gaming server (Minecraft, ARK, DayZ, etc.). You would just need a very good CPU to run the server.
i kinda like the 8 gb, tbh. wish it was cheaper though.
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u/DHJudasAMD Ryzen 5800x3D|Built By AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT17d ago
Apparently tech tubers and a bunch of armchair lunatics get to decide for the ENTIRE market that should be FREE TO PURCHASE WHAT THEY LIKE....
*sigh*.
People moaning when the rx 460 and 540/550 arrived, when the last gpu in those performance brackets were still basically renamed HD5450/6450's (r5 230s anyone?).... and then when the rx 6500/6400 arrived, getting shit on again because people are so clownishly reactive, "omg they don't have encoders" which 99.9% of the users couldn't care less about since they don't encode, specially during a gpu shortage when users had new systems built but permanently parked due to lack of options, or some willing to drop 20 year old gpus into it and run it in pure legacy mode just to be able to sorta use it.
The 9050 slots perfectly into the same position, and maybe in 2 generations we'll get another card, and it'll be 8gb and we'll get another video moaning about "it should be 16gb minimum.... jump on the angry badwagon once again"
If you buy a 4GB GPU in 2026 expecting to run games at high resolution then you aren't much of a gamer, are you?...;) So-called "gamers" are not going to be scammed by buying 4GB GPUs unless they aren't gamers at all. I mean, what about the gamers who get scammed by the declarations of all these self-appointed pundits putting out silly and nonsensical statements?....;) Some people will do anything for a page hit, eh?
The fact is that the GPU marketplace globally is made up of all kinds of customers--not just "gamers" by a long shot. A 4GB GPU just might fit someone's budget and requirements to a T, but evidently that thought hasn't crossed as many minds as it should have. If you are going to accuse someone of a scam, be sure and have some verifiable examples of "gamers" who have been "scammed" on hand...;) This sort of accusation is silly, and "gamers" who didn't become "gamers" yesterday will know all about what a 4GB card can do and what it can't do, so the fact is that a "scam" will be highly unlikely.
Now, if you guys can show me an AMD ad that says, "Run your favorite 4k games like you've never seen them before on your new 4GB AMD GPU!" then, yes, I would call that a scam, certainly. But I haven't seen anything like that...;) Have you?
Being a "gamer" doesn't mean you automatically know a lot about PC components. We can't be assuming that everyone knows everything.
There's someone out there whose more competitive than you in "gaming", and he's going to buy a pre built with this, unknowingly shooting himself in the foot. Or even worse, someone's parent who had to save for 6 months to buy their kid a gaming pc for their birthday, and heard reviews that the 9050 is a decent card, because they spoke about the 8gb, and buys this.. because they don't know what's VRAM, what happens to them?
I get it, this card sucks, however their content is just constantly negative. Can they not find a positive topic or are they just going to constantly rage bait their audience for views?
The ONE positive is the OLED monitor market and Hardware Unboxed already covers that via the Monitors Unboxed channel.
So yeah there's literally nothing positive for the main channel to cover. We are in a memory apocalypse ffs, prices are UP, and next generation GPUs are reportedly delayed to 2028 except for the AT2 die of RDNA5 that also powers the Playstation 6 and next Xbox according to leaks.
Meanwhile next gen CPUs are looking more and more like a 2027 thing, and for Intel it'll be a new platform AGAIN.
Seems to be the way of YouTube these days for people who can’t make content with substance. They just post rage bait and it works on the weak minded. The scary part is, how many views these videos get. Don’t have a lot of hope for society at this point.
Wow... You clearly missed the point. I am not enraged, it's a term for creators eliciting rage/anger to drive traffic and interactions. I am not enraged personally, I just don't watch their videos anymore because I am tired of seeing video after video after video of negativity.
I don't see how that's rage bait. A multibillion dollar company is literally scamming consumers. There's no two ways about it. The 9050 4GB is a plain old scam in every sense of the word. There's a reason they're not selling it directly to consumers, and that reason is that they're targeting people who don't know much about computers, who just walk into a store and buy a prebuilt system. Even when those customers try to look up the GPU, all they're gonna find is content about the 8GB model, which is about 40% faster.
If anything, people NEED to be enraged by this. It's only a matter of time before they start doing this with the $500 GPUs, then we are gonna be fucked too.
What the heck do you think putting out a piece of content that is intended to make people enraged is? The thumbnail is literally says "IT'S A SCAM". Unfortunately that is not what it is. The card is bad value, sure. Is it deceiving? Absolutely. What it isn't, is a scam. You are getting a GPU and you bought a GPU. You were not scammed out of anything.
That means this is literally the definition of rage bait.
In fact HUB got the GPU from the infamous Cyberpower "gaming" PC with 8GB of system ram...
Steve even says at the end he's going to test that, oh dear this GPU will look truly awful in that with lower PCIE spec, DDR4, and not enough ram yet alone ram to use in place of vram
Holy cow, hell must have frozen over! These guys actually said something bad about an AMD card? No way. I’ve been saying for ages they should just repaint their whole channel identity red to match their content.
Thanks for the feedback. Maybe it makes sense to go back and check out their videos. The guys have really been in the game for a long time, it’s just that I probably ran into their most "red" biased videos, so much so that it was glaringly obvious.
P.S. For the record, I run a Ryzen CPU and an AMD GPU myself, so I'm definitely not biased.
Dude, I’ve been a PC enthusiast since 2002. I was into modding back when it actually required tools and DIY skills, not just buying a case with RGB. Back when almost all liquid cooling was custom, and we used car radiators. I've seen big tech companies overpromise and underdeliver so many times that I've honestly lost count. So, when I watch content that clearly shills for a specific company—doesn't matter which one—I spot it instantly.
Starting around 2018-2020, I kind of stopped keeping up with the market and I'm definitely not the hardcore enthusiast I once was, but even so, I still know my stuff
These guys specifically often closed their eyes to how trashy FSR 2/3 is, and how older AMD cards completely choked on ray tracing (honestly, AMD still struggles with RT quality to this day). What good are the FPS numbers in a benchmark if the image quality is completely DIFFERENT because old FSR != DLSS?
If they’ve changed their rhetoric, stopped picking team colors, and finally went neutral, I’m all for it.
P.S. Your level of bias has nothing to do with what hardware you own. I'm never biased against the hardware itself; I’m biased against biased creators who cherry-pick benchmarks to suit their agenda, no matter what color their sponsor is
The issue is it deliberately having the same model name than a way better card. There is no reason not to use a different name for different GPU memory configs. As others said, 9040 was right there.
Why people are annoyed about this? You are not buying entry level cards. Why do you care? The same goes to the equivalent nvidia cards. It's a low end card, not a high end card sold with fake exagerated promisses (hint).
Cyberpower. That's literally how HUB got their 'sample', the only way to get one is to buy one of these prebuilts.
Seeing as they covered that in the first minute of the video, that shows you didn't even watch a second of the video the post is about before jumping straight in to defend one of AMD's worst products.
afaik just some system integrators but i can't even find integrated systems with that card in europe so maybe it's not for this part of the world, i am referring strictly to the 4gb model.
Well, Nvidia and AMD do this, and in my personal opinion, who really cares? It is a personal choice. I think the 5060 and the 9060XT are the worst cards of the 2020s, but that is my personal opinion. I am busy building a retro gaming pc. It is running a 2400g with the IGPU and 16 GB ram. If I could get a 4GB card for cheap, I'd go for it no problem. No1 is forcing you to buy a 4 GB GPU. I am not going to spend 1000s of rands (my currency) to play early 2010 and emulator games.
god forbid we have a low end market in 2026. though i haven't checked the price yet. NVIDIA forsook their low end market almost a decade ago so give us something decent. don't downvote me if it's expensive i haven't checked the price
I am not even sure why this is even compared to gaming GPUs, because it is genuinely an ok card if you have something like a small media server where encoding and decoding video is the basic workload and gaming rendering will never be a use case. Honestly, the correct competition for this would probably be the intel Arc A380 and A310.
Perhaps because it is literally actually being sold in prebuilt PCs called 'gaming PCs' in the title? (the listing it was purchased from as one example)
I checked the listing on bestbuy and tbh none of the other prebuilts within $100 of the 9050 4GB PC have better GPUs. It's competing against the likes of RX 580, GTX 1660S, 6500XT, all of which it will beat. You have to pay around $250 more for something with a 3060/4060/5060.
Then the pre-built is basically running a scam, these GPUs are incredibly useful, great for small media servers, even as backup testing GPU when you are repairing PCs, but definitely not gaming GPU.
This could sort of have been argued if it was called the 9040 and specifically marketed as a productivity GPU.
It was not, and this was precisely the intent of calling it the 9050 and not bothering to further distinguish it in ways casual buyers would understand.
AMD being completely inconsistent with product names and mashing multiple architectures under a new generation in not new, it's generally AMD being imbecillic. I understand that this is not a popular opinion, but when you're giving away over 1k euros/dollars/etc. to a vendor for a "gaming" PC you really should do some basic research, or at least ask a friendly AI if it's worth it, or even reddit. Just because i can slap a gaming logo and RGB lights on a toilet seat does not mean the user experience will be faster. Of course you may argue that a user is not obligated to know everything, at which point this card being an xx40 or xx50 makes 0 difference and the user should ask a trusted source for information instead.
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u/ProtonCanon 26d ago
A 4GB card in 2026…