Today's Prime Day graphics card prices mean you should be picking AMD over Nvidia

AMD RX 6800 XT and Nvidia RTX 3080
(Image credit: AMD, Nvidia)

If you're looking for a Prime Day graphics card deal then our advice is to pick from the pool of AMD Radeon GPUs on offer right now. That's nothing to do with any bias on our part—we love all our children equally—but simply because it just makes more sense to buy an AMD card over an Nvidia one with the way GPU prices have shaken out.

For the longest time it was all but impossible to buy any graphics card, and if you could find one they would almost always be many times more expensive than the original MSRP of the cards. That was the same for AMD and Nvidia, but you were generally more likely to find a GeForce GPU in the wild.

Fast forward to now, and the mining boom has gone bust and the supply chain crisis has abated. At least for now. That means we're finally getting decent stock of graphics cards, and with increased supply we get lower prices. 

But it seems the prices are lower on a tier-by-tier basis with AMD cards compared with their equivalent Nvidia GPU. We've compiled the latest graphics cards alongside the 3DMark Time Spy Extreme performance of some previous-gen GPUs, to give an idea of relative performance. The hierarchy of graphics card performance scales along the same lines as our own measure of aggregated frame rate performance across the PC Gamer benchmarking suite at 1440p.

(Image credit: Future)

You may not have known, for example, that the Radeon RX 6700 XT can actually outperform the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti a lot of the time, the same goes for the Radeon RX 6600 XT and GeForce RTX 3060. When we first reviewed the cards at their respective launches, the GeForce GPUs made more sense at their MSRP, but it's taking longer for Nvidia's mid-range cards to return to that level than AMD's.

So, considering you can pick those Radeon cards up cheaper than the Nvidia ones, that's where the smart money should be going.

PNY RTX 3060 Ti XLR8 | 8GB GDDR6 | 4,864 shaders | 1,665MHz Boost | $719.99 $499.99 at Amazon (save $220)

PNY RTX 3060 Ti XLR8 | 8GB GDDR6 | 4,864 shaders | 1,665MHz Boost | $719.99 $499.99 at Amazon (save $220)
It's frustrating that the mid-range Nvidia cards are still so far above MSRP, but this is the cheapest we've seen the RTX 3060 Ti for in ages. Replacement mid-range cards won't pop up until the middle of next year, so the RTX 3060 Ti will still be happily delivering outstanding 1440p gaming performance for a while yet.

Gigabyte RX 6700 XT Eagle | 12GB GDDR6 | 2,560 shaders | 2,581MHz Boost | $549.99 $449.99 at Newegg (save $100)

Gigabyte RX 6700 XT Eagle | 12GB GDDR6 | 2,560 shaders | 2,581MHz Boost | $549.99 $449.99 at Newegg (save $100)
This RX 6700 XT is $50 cheaper than the lowest cost RTX 3060 Ti we've found, and delivers the same rasterized gaming performance. Ray tracing, it's admittedly slower, but honestly, you're probably not going to want to turn RT on with the Nvidia card, either. This is a quality mid-range card, with a serious triple-fan cooler to boot.

PNY RTX 3060 XLR8 Revel Epix-X | 12GB GDDR6 | 3,584 shaders | 1,777MHz Boost | $459.99 $384.99 at B&H Photo (save $75)

PNY RTX 3060 XLR8 Revel Epix-X | 12GB GDDR6 | 3,584 shaders | 1,777MHz Boost | $459.99 $384.99 at B&H Photo (save $75)
This compact RTX 3060 would be a great option for that mini-ITX build you've been planning, but couldn't find a graphics card to fit. Or even one you could afford. At just $55 over the original MSRP it's not a bad price for the lowest-spec Nvidia card we'd recommend today.

MSI Mech RX 6600 XT | 8GB GDDR6 | 2,048 shaders | 2,602MHz | $399.99 $359.99 at Newegg (save $40)

MSI Mech RX 6600 XT | 8GB GDDR6 | 2,048 shaders | 2,602MHz | $399.99 $359.99 at Newegg (save $40)
Again, the smart money is buying AMD graphics cards at the low end of the GPU market. The RX 6600 XT is both cheaper and faster than the RTX 3060, despite losing out on the memory front. Don't be fooled by that 12GB vs. 8GB thing.

XFX RX 6600 Speedster SWFT | 8GB GDDR6 | 1,792 shaders | 2,491MHz Boost | $289.99 at B&H Photo

XFX RX 6600 Speedster SWFT | 8GB GDDR6 | 1,792 shaders | 2,491MHz Boost | $289.99 at B&H Photo
We're not quite at the point we were where any in stock GPU counts as a 'deal,' but this is the cheapest current-gen graphics card around that we would actually recommend. The RX 6600 and RX 6600 XT surround the RTX 3060 in terms of gaming performance, so this card is really not far off Nvidia's main mainstream GPU at all. Generally only by a few seconds. 

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Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

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