More AMD and Nvidia graphics cards are now at the recommended price – or have dropped below that level – than GPUs that exceed their MSRP, according to a new report; but it is Team Red that offers the most competitive prices.
it comes from Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab) who compressed a load of sales data to find that for current-gen RTX 3000 and RX 6000 graphics cards in May, prices dropped 15% on average compared to what retailers were asking in April.
As noted, just over half of current-gen GPUs are now at or below the recommended price, although it’s AMD that is leading the way here, in their RDNA 2 offerings, only the RX 6800 and 6800 XT are now priced above their own. suggested price .
Unfortunately, most Nvidia RTX 3000 graphics cards are still above the MSRP, with Tom noting that the RTX 3050 through RTX 3080 10GB models are priced up by around 20% on average. That said, these cards are still seeing price drops compared to the previous month, and everything is moving in the right direction.
Review: Nvidia GPUs in great demand
Of course, it’s good news to see prices come down, and largely in May, even if Nvidia’s Ampere offerings have yet to normalize and return to their MSRP. Of course, this is a measure of demand in many ways, because as we’ve seen in recent times, Team Green’s GPUs are selling strongly compared to AMD’s.
Keep in mind that, as we reported a month ago at the major American retailer Newegg, the Nvidia models were one of the top 20 selling graphics cards, and in fact, looking back now, the situation is even worse for AMD – the company doesn’t has a single GPU on that top 20 chart (the highest entry is a model RX 6600 at number 24, actually).
So higher demand seems like a plausible enough reason why prices don’t drop as quickly for Nvidia GPUs. What could change things is the possibility that Nvidia could soon announce its next-gen Lovelace graphics cards, and these RTX 4000 GPUs could go on sale sooner than expected – which would no doubt convince some (or many) people to consider playing a game on hold, forcing RTX 3000 prices to drop to look more tempting.
Tom also made an interesting comparison in terms of calculating a rough performance-per-dollar metric for top current (and previous) generation GPUs, and the interesting news is that AMD is winning here, perhaps unsurprisingly, as the prices of the Team Red are falling faster as noted.
So what is the best value proposition among contemporary graphics cards available right now? That would be AMD’s RX 6600, which represents an excellent choice for 1080p gamers, with a performance-per-dollar rating of 0.23 (the lower the better) – although if you need something with more horsepower for 1440p, the best value choice is the RX 6700 XT rated at 0.201. For Nvidia, the king of value for 1080p is the RTX 3060 (at 0.175), and for 1440p it’s the 3060 Ti (also rated at 0.175, which is not This one far behind the 6700 XT to be fair).
For those interested in some historical perspective, Tom’s rated GPUs since 2015, and the best performer for the asking price turned out to be the GTX 780 (at 0.245, so the RX 6600 isn’t far from that anyway – and obviously offers much better overall performance, of course).