So the big AMD Radeon announcement has come and gone and now we have official pricing from AMD along with a mixed bag of performance results and a new gimmick/mechanism that requires you to have a 5000 series AMD CPU for max performance??
Let's skip that potential controversy and go to the pricing.
6900XT $999
6800XT $649
6800 $579
Talking points - the 6900XT and the 6800XT respectively traded blows with the 3090 and 3080 in the benchmarks that AMD chose to show.
The pricing makes sense to the extent that the performance of the top two cards seems to be neck and neck but the 6800 looks like a HUGE missed opportunity.
The 6800 performs about on par with the 3070 but costs $79 MORE?? That's a huge PILL to swallow considering that AMD is the company that is looking to regain market share but they are priced higher than Nvidia. I know you're going to say - hey more memory. But at that price point an extra 8GB does not make sense and it doesn't make the card perform any faster.
The 6900XT is $500 less than the 3090 ok, good. But is it worth $350 more for a 10% performance bump over the 6800XT? Of course NOT! I blame Nvidia for setting a bad precedent but I blame AMD for taking the bait. Instead of setting the prices as competitive as possible to win marketshare, AMD bumped up their prices to unprecedent levels, and they are not the GPU performance leaders yet. This price bump is premature.
Prices I would have liked to see:
6900XT $799
6800XT $599
6800 $449
If the prices had come in at what I wanted to see consumers would have had to ask themselves - am I just nutty not to jump on AMD with the savings I could have?
Instead we got the first set of numbers and we find ourselves asking uncomfortable questions such as: why would I pay $79 over the Nvidia alternative on the low end of the tier, why wouldn't I just sit tight and pay andextra 50 bucks for Nvidia drivers that "just work", and do I really want to shell out $1000 for a video card when I can get 90% of the performance for 2/3 the price?
Share your thoughts and feelings about the new AMD RDNA2 launch cards here!!
Let's skip that potential controversy and go to the pricing.
6900XT $999
6800XT $649
6800 $579
Talking points - the 6900XT and the 6800XT respectively traded blows with the 3090 and 3080 in the benchmarks that AMD chose to show.
The pricing makes sense to the extent that the performance of the top two cards seems to be neck and neck but the 6800 looks like a HUGE missed opportunity.
The 6800 performs about on par with the 3070 but costs $79 MORE?? That's a huge PILL to swallow considering that AMD is the company that is looking to regain market share but they are priced higher than Nvidia. I know you're going to say - hey more memory. But at that price point an extra 8GB does not make sense and it doesn't make the card perform any faster.
The 6900XT is $500 less than the 3090 ok, good. But is it worth $350 more for a 10% performance bump over the 6800XT? Of course NOT! I blame Nvidia for setting a bad precedent but I blame AMD for taking the bait. Instead of setting the prices as competitive as possible to win marketshare, AMD bumped up their prices to unprecedent levels, and they are not the GPU performance leaders yet. This price bump is premature.
Prices I would have liked to see:
6900XT $799
6800XT $599
6800 $449
If the prices had come in at what I wanted to see consumers would have had to ask themselves - am I just nutty not to jump on AMD with the savings I could have?
Instead we got the first set of numbers and we find ourselves asking uncomfortable questions such as: why would I pay $79 over the Nvidia alternative on the low end of the tier, why wouldn't I just sit tight and pay andextra 50 bucks for Nvidia drivers that "just work", and do I really want to shell out $1000 for a video card when I can get 90% of the performance for 2/3 the price?
Share your thoughts and feelings about the new AMD RDNA2 launch cards here!!
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