Discounts are always good … and anything sub-$500 is even better!
Taken from TPU … AMD’s marketing department this week continued its battle to outwit arch rival NVIDIA in GPU VRAM pricing wars – Sasa Marinkovic, a senior director at Team Red’s gaming promotion department, tweeted out a simple and concise statement yesterday: “Our @amdradeon 16 GB gaming experience starts at $499.” He included a helpful chart that lines up part of the AMD Radeon GPU range against a couple of hand-picked NVIDIA GeForce RTX cards, with emphasis on comparing pricing and respective allotments of VRAM. The infographic indicates AMD’s first official declaration of the (last generation “Big Navi” architecture) RX 6800 GPU bottoming out at $499, an all time low, as well as hefty cut affecting the old range topping RX 6950 XT – now available for $649 (an ASRock version is going for $599 at the moment). The RX 6800 XT sits in-between at $579, but it is curious that the RX 6900 XT did not get a slot on the chart.
AMD’s latest play against NVIDIA in the video memory size stake is nothing really new – earlier this month it encouraged potential customers to select one of its pricey current generation RX 7900 XT or XTX GPUs. The main reason being that the hefty Radeon cards pack more onboard VRAM than equivalent GeForce RTX models – namely the 4070 Ti and 4080 – therefore future-proofed for increasingly memory hungry games. The latest batch of marketing did not account for board partner variants of the (RDNA3-based) RX 7900 XT GPU selling for as low as $762 this week.
AMD’s senior marketeer did not bother to include any of Intel’s offerings in the comparison chart – Team Blue’s Arc A770 16 GB graphics card can be purchased for $350, but this range-topper cannot trade blows performance-wise with the $499 RX 6800 GPU. AMD is currently busy working on lower specification cards in the Radeon RX-7000 family – set for tentative release windows in the coming months. It will be interesting to find out about intended memory allocations for the cheaper models, as well as a different marketing angle – how will Team Red address the fitting of smaller pools of VRAM to upcoming low and mid-range cards?
Source: TPU, Sasa Marinkovic Tweet