midian18
Posts: 10,106 +135
In brief: The next-generation graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD are only a few months away, which means we're seeing several discounts on current-gen models. Radeon cards especially are becoming cheaper, which aligns with recent claims that Team Red has delayed its RDNA 4 release to clear the surplus of RDNA 3 inventory.
The holiday season is drawing closer, and Amazon's Prime Days start next week, but AMD fans can already grab some discounts on the company's latest cards.
The Radeon 7900 XT launched in December 2022 with a massive $900 price, something that we said at the time made it dead on arrival. Nine months later, we took another look as the price had dropped to around $750. This made it a much better proposition thanks to its greatly improved cost-per-frame metric, especially at 1440p.
Now, the triple-fan XFX Speedster MERC310 AMD Radeon RX 7900XT Ultra with its 20GB of GDDR6 is down 18% to just $659 on Amazon. The card managed a 15-game average of 82 FPS at 4K (139 at 1440p) in our tests, so it's no slouch, though it's certainly power-hungry.
The discount comes a day after claims that AMD might have delayed its RDNA 4 launch slightly due to a "massive" oversupply problem with Navi 31-based cards, which includes the RX 7900 XT. It seems the company is trying to clear as much stock as possible before selling what will be the more powerful and cheaper Radeon RX 8000 successors.
Another RDNA 3 card that has been given a price cut is the RX 7700 XT. It was released last September with a $450 MSRP, which we again felt was too high. We also said in the review that it would be worth buying if it fell to $400.
Amazon has now dropped the price of RX 7700 XT to $349, $100 lower than its launch MSRP. Even better is that the card is part of a game bundle promotion that includes the excellent Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 and Unknown 9: Awakening, essentially saving you even more money.
One caveat is that the model is a PowerColor Fighter, so it's not from one of the more popular AIB partners, but around 80% of all Amazon's reviews are four or five stars.
Our 15-game FPS average for the RX 7700 XT was 91 at 1440p and 52 at 4K, putting it comfortably ahead of Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti 16G.
Expect to see more price drops on current-gen cards as the year progresses, especially as Nvidia and AMD could announce the successors at CES in January.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7700 XT see big price drops ahead of RDNA 4 release
