Choose your weapon: AMD's last-gen Radeon RX 6700 XT or the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti? On pure raster performance, there isn't much in it. So, it's almost certain that the RX 6700 XT will have a hefty lead over the upcoming RTX 4060, which isn't quite out yet but Nvidia just brought forward to June 29th.
After all, for the plain RTX 4060 Nvidia has hacked the CUDA down from 4,352 in the 4060 Ti to just 3,072. Yuck. Anyway, the point here is that ASRock's take on AMD RX 6700 XT can now be had for just $310 on Newegg. That's just a whisker more than the RTX 4060's $299 launch price.
OK, Nvidia's DLSS scaling tech remains superior to AMD's FSR. But as we found with the RTX 4060 Ti, the Frame Generation bit of DLSS 3 doesn't work quite as well with smaller GPUs as it does on higher performing members of the RTX 40-series.
If that holds true for the RTX 4060, which is yet smaller again than the RTX 4060 Ti, it doesn't bode terribly well for DLSS 3 saving the RTX 4060's bacon. Further factor in the 4060's 128-bit bus and 8GB of VRAM, and the comparison with the 192-bit and 12GB RX 6700 XT only gets worse.
It's also worth remembering that the RX 6700 XT is unlikely to suddenly seem hugely outdated when its RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7000 series replacement eventually arrives. As the RX 7900 XT and XTX first demonstrated and then the RX 7600 confirmed, AMD's latest GPU architecture does bring some added performance. But it's not a huge technological leap forward.
For instance, RDNA 3 doesn't dramatically close the gap to Nvidia when it comes to ray-tracing performance. All of which means that you can snag a RX 6700 XT today, confident that the arrival of a new RX 7700 XT probably won't fill you with buyers remorse.
Anywho, as a reasonably affordable option for decent 1440p performance, a RX 6700 XT for just over $300 definitely gets our vote.
