If you're in the market for a new graphics card but your budget is less than $330, you might be tempted to get an Radeon RX 7600 XT or a GeForce RTX 4060. They're both of the latest generation of GPUs from either vendor, but they're not the fastest graphics cards you can get from that kind of money, and I'm not talking about second hand GPUs.
AMD's last-gen models are by far the best value GPUs you can get right now, and the Radeon RX 6700 XT is the best bang-for-buck graphics card, despite being three years old.
With 2,560 shaders that can run at up to 2,581 MHz, it's got more than enough poke for all the latest games at 1080p and in plenty of cases, 1440p too. Unlike the RTX 4060, you're getting a sensible amount of VRAM—12GB of GDDR6, running at 16 Gbps, for an aggregated memory bandwidth of 384 GB/s.
That might not sound very much, but the RDNA 2 GPU inside the card sports an enormous 96MB of L3 cache, which takes a lot of strain off the memory bus. The downside to all that tech is that is uses a fair bit of power, hitting 230 W with ease. And it's also AMD's first consumer GPU to have ray tracing support, so it's pretty weak with this enabled in games, especially compared to Nvidia's latest graphics processors.
Another advantage that the RTX 4060 has over the RX 6700 XT is its full support for DLSS 3.5—AI upscaling, frame generation, and ray tracing denoising. AMD's can do the first two through the use of clever shaders (aka FSR 3) but it's not quite as good as Nvidia's tech.
But forget about all of that and just enjoy the fundamental rendering chops. It's as least as powerful as Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti and in some games, notably faster, as we found when we reviewed the RX 6700 XT.
And for $20 more, you could get the Radeon RX 6750 XT. It's almost exactly the same as the RX 6700 XT, but the boost clock is 2,600 MHz and the 12GB VRAM runs at 18 Gbps, for 432 GB/s of bandwidth. They're only tiny improvements but with a spot of overclocking, you might be able to push things further, if you like tweaking your GPU.
When the RX 6750 XT launched back in 2022, we found that the small boost in performance just wasn't worth the extra cash but now that it's just 6% more expensive, it's certainly worth considering. Do note that the extra speed does push the peak power consumption up to 250 W, though.
It doesn't really matter which one you go for though, as they're both excellent mainstream graphics cards, and far better value than the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 XT.
