Saturday, April 29th 2023
AMD Marketing Highlights Sub-$500 Pricing of 16 GB Radeon GPUs
AMD's marketing department this week continued its battle to outwit arch rival NVIDIA in GPU VRAM pricing wars - Sasa Marinkovic, a senior director at Team Red's gaming promotion department, tweeted out a simple and concise statement yesterday: "Our @amdradeon 16 GB gaming experience starts at $499." He included a helpful chart that lines up part of the AMD Radeon GPU range against a couple of hand-picked NVIDIA GeForce RTX cards, with emphasis on comparing pricing and respective allotments of VRAM. The infographic indicates AMD's first official declaration of the (last generation "Big Navi" architecture) RX 6800 GPU bottoming out at $499, an all time low, as well as hefty cut affecting the old range topping RX 6950 XT - now available for $649 (an ASRock version is going for $599 at the moment). The RX 6800 XT sits in-between at $579, but it is curious that the RX 6900 XT did not get a slot on the chart.
AMD's latest play against NVIDIA in the video memory size stake is nothing really new - earlier this month it encouraged potential customers to select one of its pricey current generation RX 7900 XT or XTX GPUs. The main reason being that the hefty Radeon cards pack more onboard VRAM than equivalent GeForce RTX models - namely the 4070 Ti and 4080 - therefore future-proofed for increasingly memory hungry games. The latest batch of marketing did not account for board partner variants of the (RDNA3-based) RX 7900 XT GPU selling for as low as $762 this week.
AMD's senior marketeer did not bother to include any of Intel's offerings in the comparison chart - Team Blue's Arc A770 16 GB graphics card can be purchased for $350, but this range-topper cannot trade blows performance-wise with the $499 RX 6800 GPU. AMD is currently busy working on lower specification cards in the Radeon RX-7000 family - set for tentative release windows in the coming months. It will be interesting to find out about intended memory allocations for the cheaper models, as well as a different marketing angle - how will Team Red address the fitting of smaller pools of VRAM to upcoming low and mid-range cards?
Source:
Sasa Marinkovic Tweet
AMD's latest play against NVIDIA in the video memory size stake is nothing really new - earlier this month it encouraged potential customers to select one of its pricey current generation RX 7900 XT or XTX GPUs. The main reason being that the hefty Radeon cards pack more onboard VRAM than equivalent GeForce RTX models - namely the 4070 Ti and 4080 - therefore future-proofed for increasingly memory hungry games. The latest batch of marketing did not account for board partner variants of the (RDNA3-based) RX 7900 XT GPU selling for as low as $762 this week.
64 Comments on AMD Marketing Highlights Sub-$500 Pricing of 16 GB Radeon GPUs
Here I am, chillin out w/ 16GiB of HBM2 on Vega for <$100 :D
Don't care that Navi's uArch is 'faster'. HBM won't be beat for years to come
Which, makes me wish for a new GPU from AMD that uses their MCM layout to attach HBM# to a 'controller' that can be paired with a myriad of GPUs and PCBs. That way, they can work out good yields on an HBM 'modular memtroller', to keep costs reasonable. (As I recall, the barrier to HBM in consumer products were interconnect/bonding issues, not so much the yields on HBM silicon itself)
PS: similar situation happens with the 6650XT vs the 6600XT
PPS: fingers crossed that this means there will be RDNA3 products at 499$/€ with 16GB VRAM
Anyone wanna bet on who will win ?
Maybe Lisa will start wearing a nicer jacket than wuhang ..:roll:
While 'gamers' rarely run across it, there are applications where more (fast) VRAM is better than more ASIC processing power. Most of the 'pro-workstation' GPUs throughout the last 2 decades 'apply'.
In the world of gaming, more faster VRAM is very useful for extra AA and supersampling on older games; meaning re-plays of personal favorites can look closer to one's own visually upconverted memory of said game.
(I know for a fact, that I'm not alone in 'remembering' old games looking better than they actually did/do.)
I really hope they don't but it wouldn't be the first time AMD's marketing team makes a blunder like that.
I'd rather pay to watch a figurative and/or literal cage match
Secondly it seems that my rumors are more on the money than not and I don't like it one bit.
4GB of vRAM, yet would meet or beat my 2 different RX 580 8GBs, reliably.
Never again
the gap between the 6800 vs 6800XT is larger than 6800xt vs 6900xt gap.
I bought 6800XT around Xmas 2020. Stopped buying Nvidia cards since Ampere due to low VRAM and didn't want to pay for top halo 90 class SKU absurdly high price.
Best decision ever. Most important thing is solid and future-proof hardware, then any software perks. Do not allow marketing of RT and DLSS to cloud your mind.