Nvidia's (relatively) keenly priced new RTX 40-series Super graphics cards are having the desired effect. Desired effect, that is, from our perspective because AMD is responding with unofficial price cuts to its Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs. Cue the lowest ever price on the Radeon RX 7900 XT, now available for $699 at Newegg. It had been available for the same price at Amazon, but it appears to have sold out as I write these very words.
That new price for the RDNA 3 card slides it in neatly between the $799 Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super and the $599 RTX 4070 Super. Which then begs the immediate performance comparison question. To be honest it does rather depend on the games you play, but overall and on average, the 7900 XT is usually a whisker faster for plain old raster rendering than the RTX 4070 Ti Super.
If that makes the RX 7900 XT's new low price look like a steal, it kind of is. Until you factor in ray tracing, where it falls behind the RTX 4070 Ti Super by some distance and is even a little slower than the cheaper RTX 4070 Super.
Then further factor in Nvidia DLSS's broad upscaling superiority to AMD's FSR, Nvidia's more polished Frame Generation, and you end up with a fairly evenly balanced contest. Indeed, you might say that at $699 the RX 7900 XT is priced exactly where it needs to be to offer an intriguing but not completely overwhelming proposition versus the Nvidia competition.
Put another way, with Nvidia's new Supers on the scene the RX 7900 XT really had to come down to remain relevant. Even at $699 it's not an absolute slam dunk, especially not if you value ray tracing and upscaling. At $599 it would be pretty hard to ignore. At $699 it's a case of pros and cons versus the Nvidia options. It was ever thus...
Still, however you slice it the good news is that you're getting a lot more graphics for your money in the current market. The RX 7900 XT is now fully $200 cheaper than is was at launch a little over a year ago and the RTX 4070 Ti Super gives you performance pretty close to an RTX 4080 for $400 under that GPU's original MSRP.
Yes, we'd like to see prices come down further still. $500 ought to be enough to buy a really, really good graphics card. But things are moving in the right direction.
