I put three budget GPUs head-to-head for local AI — only one earns its higher price

Three graphics cards are fighting for the same buyer right now: someone who wants to run local AI models without spending RTX 5070 Ti money. Intel's Arc B580, AMD's Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB, and Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti 16GB all launched within the same rough price band, and by August 2026 all three have drifted well above their original MSRPs along with the rest of the market. I lined up their actual current prices, VRAM, and memory bandwidth — the spec that decides how fast a model actually generates text, not just whether it fits — and the card with the smallest price tag isn't the one I'd buy.

why bandwidth matters more than the spec sheet suggests

VRAM capacity decides whether a model loads. Bandwidth decides how fast it talks back to you, because every token a local LLM generates requires reading the model's weights from memory again — inference is bottlenecked by how fast the card can move data, not by how much raw compute it has. That's why the RTX 5060 Ti's 448 GB/s matters as much as its extra headroom: on paper the Arc B580's 456 GB/s edges it out, but Nvidia's GDDR7 controller and CUDA software stack extract more of that theoretical number in practice, as Tom's Hardware's own review of the card found. The RX 9060 XT is the outlier here — 16GB of capacity, but the slowest memory of the three at 322 GB/s, which Tom's Hardware's testing showed translates directly to fewer tokens per second once a model is loaded, even though it never runs out of room the way the 12GB Arc card can on larger models.

how to actually choose between these three

Budget GPU pricing in 2026 is a moving target, and none of these three is going to get cheaper while memory costs keep climbing. If you need to buy this month, match the card to the model size you actually plan to run rather than the biggest number on the spec sheet — a 12GB card that fits your model with room to spare beats a 16GB card that's still $150 more than you wanted to spend.