Is this the best Prime Day graphic card deal? It just might be. The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is a little elderly. But for jut $299 from Amazon, it's probably the best real-world GPU you can buy.
For starters you don't have to worry about VRAM allocation or memory bandwidth thanks to 12GB running over a 192-bit bus. In other words, this card is properly specified for 1440p gaming. It won't run out of bandwidth or memory when you turn the details up.
In hose regards, it makes Nvidia's new 8GB, 128-bit RTX 4060 look silly. More to the point, the 6700 XT is just plain faster than the RTX 4060 for straight up raster rendering, and a lot faster at that. And it's yours for exactly the same price.
Is there a catch? Well, the 6700 XT's RDNA 2 architecture is getting on a bit. It wasn't the best for ray-tracing at launch over two years ago and that hasn't improved since. Of course, if you try to run a modern and demanding game with ray tracing on an RTX 4060 at 1440p, you'll probably have an even worse experience thanks to the limited underlying GPU performance and the very real risk of running out of VRAM.
Another potential downside to the 6700 XT is that AMD's FSR scaling tech simply isn't as good as Nvidia's DLSS. That applies both to resolution scaling and the fact that AMD still has no answer to frame generation in DLSS 3.
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We wouldn't want to overstate the important of frame gen. It does nothing to help with latency (in fact it adds a little), so it doesn't make games more responsive. But where supported (and admittedly support for frame generation is relatively limited) it does improve rendering smoothness.
But overall, at this $299 price point, it's no contest. The 6700 XT is ultimately a proper mid-range GPU with specs to match while the RTX 4060 is built on Nvidia's smallest and weediest graphics chip and really ought to be called the RTX 4050.
