AMD’s newest GPUs could mean realistic pricing for once

It seemed that AMD and Nvidia lived in a fantasy world. They would drop prices like $329 either $479 for a mid-range graphics card, knowing that Really pay hundreds more for now pandemic intermediaries They had their court. But today, AMD seems to be waking up.

With the recently announced $1,099 AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT, $549 Radeon 6750 XT, and $399 Radeon 6650 XT, the company is finally pricing its graphics cards based on the market rather than creating a fake MSRP. When you combine that with the fact that AMD graphics cards they are almost back down to generally sane pricesIt means there’s a good chance you can buy these new for the price AMD is quoting.

That’s good, because price is by far the most interesting thing about the cards AMD is announcing today.

While we’ve heard rumors of next-generation AMD RDNA 3 chips on the horizon, the new RX 6950 XT, 6750 XT, and 6650 XT are nothing of the sort. In fact, they are not new GPUs at all. As the “50” in their names might suggest, they’re direct refinements of the existing RX 6900 XT, 6700 XT, and 6600 XT with literally the exact same silicon, just with new firmware for faster clocks and faster memory.

Image: AMD

And while any performance boost is nice, this one isn’t going to be big: each “50” card offers a 5 to 6 percent boost over the standard version. In some games, the difference can be as little as 1 frame per second, according to AMD’s reviewer’s guide. On others running at particularly high frame rates, you might see an increase of 10fps or more. Also, those bumps don’t come for free: the cards have a 20-35W higher TDP than the originals, theoretically drawing more power and/or producing more heat.

AMD isn’t trying to hide any of this. “These will not be major improvements,” the company told reporters. “Nothing has changed physically.”

Instead, the company is trying to point out how much more performance per dollar and performance per watt you can get compared to Nvidia, at the prices you’ll actually pay to get Nvidia versus AMD.

Here are the graphics that AMD provides:

Image: AMD

Image: AMD

If you can actually buy these cards for these prices, it looks pretty promising for AMD, at least for those gamers who aren’t waiting for next-gen GPUs or prices to drop even further, at least until Nvidia makes its next move.

If you’re interested, AMD says they’ll all go on sale today with cooler reference versions of the RX 6950 XT and RX 6750 XT. available on amd and ASRock, Asus, Biostar, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, XFX, and Yeston also lined up. AMD is also sweetening the deal with a new pack “Raise the Game” that should include free games with your card purchase.

I also suspect we’ll be getting reviews of these cards today. If so, we’ll update this story if its conclusions are noticeably different from what we’d expect based on AMD graphics. Yo, I’ma go pour one for the $580 AMD Radeon RX 6800, the best value for money AMD card of this generation, which very few people managed to buy at that price. AMD told reporters the 6800 will still be around, but it’s hard to believe it will return to that price now that a $550 6750 XT has usurped its role.

Correction, 2:13 p.m. ET: AMD’s original slide stated that the 6950 XT’s Infinity Cache bandwidth was 1739 GB/S, but it’s actually 1793 GB/S. This post now includes the correct slide.