AMD is trying to throw serious shade at Nvidia’s new RTX 4070 gaming GPUs while touting its own products. A few days ago, Team Red was discrediting the RTX 4070 for its “limited” 12 GB VRAM, which, apparently, is not enough for a US$599 high-mid-range solution these days. To make things even more awkward for the new Nvidia models, AMD is now instructing AIB partners to lower prices for the high-end RX 6000-series cards that come with 16 GB of VRAM in order to make these seem more enticing versus the RTX 4070.
A quick look on Newegg reveals that ASRock’s Phantom Gaming RX 6950 XT cards are on sale for as low as US$609.99 with a special “VGAEXCAA496” promotional code. Moreover, the RX 6800 XT from the same Phantom Gaming lineup is now available for only US$539.99. Both cards qualify for the free Last of Us PC game bundle.
Initial RTX 4070 tests show that these AMD models should offer similar raster performance, but you are also getting 4 extra GB VRAM, which could help in 4K resolutions with maximum details. The 16 GB of VRAM may further prove useful in AI-intensive applications like text-to-image or text-to-video rendering systems. AMD’s cards can benefit from FSR 2 for extra frames and better image quality, but they surely do not stand a chance against Nvidia’s DLSS3 with frame generation. The ray tracing performance is another sore point for the AMD cards.
