AMD is squaring up against the RTX 4080 – and might win
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The RTX 4090 is the most significant generational jump we’ve seen from Nvidia, crushing the RTX 3090 and the RTX 3090 Ti with an appropriate price tag. Before the launch, most of us expected AMD to topple this jump, but it won’t. Instead, the new RX 7900 series will compete directly with the RTX 4080.
Frank Azor, the Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions and Marketing at AMD confirmed this at the RDNA 3 unveiling in Las Vegas. Frank said the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX is designed to compete with the RTX 4080 and the “primary reason” there were no Nvidia GeForce RTX series GPUs in the charts at all for comparison is because they didn’t have an RTX 4080 benchmark. numbers.
To get you up to speed, the GeForce RTX 4080 comes with 16GB of GDDR6X memory and starts at $1,199 (about £1,042 or AU$1850), which is $400 less than the RTX 4090. But! AMD will offer more VRAM on the $899 Radeon RX 7900 XT (20GB GDDR6) and the same VRAM as the $999 RTX 4090 (about £870 or AU$1540) Radeon RX 7900 XTX (which will have 24GB GDDR6).
Analysis: AMD’s pricing is what the GPU market needs right now
Looking back at the launch prices for the RTX 3090 and the RX 6950 XT we see a steady climb on one team and not the other. At launch, the Nvidia RTX 3090 cost $1,499 and the RX 6950 XT started at $1,099, which is a staggering $400 difference between the two.
Right now the cheapest RTX 3090 is listed on Newegg.com for $1,200 – meanwhile, the cheapest RX 6950 XT we could find was just $800. Since the average performance difference between the two graphics cards is only about 20% in favor of the Nvidia card, AMD’s current flagship is definitely better value for money.
While we don’t know exactly how well the next-gen RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX will perform, it’s a good sign that AMD is purposely targeting the 4080 as its flagship GPU competition. However, it’s already $200 cheaper, which puts AMD in a very good position if Team Red can match (or at least almost match) the performance of the RTX 4080.