Never go into international purchasing.
On an unrelated note, I read that miners are attempting a hard fork of Ethereum to prevent the Merge - and many are jumping ship to ETC. Not good - I really hope the value of ETC mining falls as more jump into it, and I REALLY REALLY hope the hard fork fails hard.
Is anyone surprised by this?
People say it's bad. And it is bad..
Insulting bad value:
Worse than expected. It has issues:
AMD’s RX 6600 XT is fine. It’s alright, from a benchmarks standpoint, but it’s also a display of stagnation in a market that is easy to exploit. AMD’s 6600 XT has strayed from value:
I don't think anyone is happy with this card's performance - 128-bit bus, GDDR6 non-X VRAM, literally no performance improvement over the old 5700 XT for the same price, terrible ray-tracing performance.
MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X Review - Value & Conclusion | TechPowerUp
I mean, that's a nice highly selective interpretation of what they're saying? Remember:
all their criticisms stem from two factors: high MSRPs, and higher street prices. Today, prices are far lower than this. That obviously doesn't excuse the silly high MSRPs, which are indeed still terrible value, but luckily that's no longer representative of on-the-ground reality.
6600 / 6600 XT is not mid-range. The 6700 XT is mid-range.
The 6600 / 6600 XT is some type of hybrid between entry level and mid-range.
... what? No. A $479 GPU is not "mid-range". That's on the border of mid-range and high-end at best. The 6600 is a solid lower mid-range option, the 6600 XT is smack-dab mid-range.
Non-sense. Why does Nvidia absolutely dominate the market with 80% vs miserable 20% for Radeon? Because "people don't care"?
Because Nvidia has an entrenched market position and a decade+ of massive mindshare advantage, leading to most GPU buyers not even considering other GPU makers, as in their mind, GPU = Geforce. This is applicable to a
vast proportion of GPU and gaming PC buyers - they either have a strong pro-Nvidia bias, or actually don't know that there are other options out there. Nvidia's mindshare advantage for GPUs is
massively stronger than what Intel had in CPUs back in 2017, and it still took AMD 3+ years of offering
far better value,
and ultimately overall better performance to get ahead in that regard in the CPU space. So, for AMD to overcome Nvidia's mindshare advantage it would still need years and years and years of offering superior products for better prices. And that's a damn tall order.
You're arguing as if markets are rational and meritocratic. They are no such thing - not even close. This is a convenient fiction that capitalists like to espouse as it legitimizes their wealth and exploitation, but it is just that: fiction. Markets are fundamentally irrational, and who comes out on top is a complex mix of luck, timing, funding, access, politics, marketing, and product quality - with the latter arguably being among the least important factors.