If you’re looking for a Prime Day graphics card deal (opens in new tab) then our advice is to pick from the pool of AMD Radeon GPUs on offer right now. That’s nothing to do with any bias on our part—we love all our children equally—but simply because it just makes more sense to buy an AMD card over an Nvidia one with the way GPU prices have shaken out.
For the longest time it was all but impossible to buy any graphics card, and if you could find one they would almost always be many times more expensive than the original MSRP of the cards. That was the same for AMD and Nvidia, but you were generally more likely to find a GeForce GPU in the wild.
Fast forward to now, and the mining boom has gone bust and the supply chain crisis has abated. At least for now. That means we’re finally getting decent stock of graphics cards, and with increased supply we get lower prices.
But it seems the prices are lower on a tier-by-tier basis with AMD cards compared with their equivalent Nvidia GPU. We’ve compiled the latest graphics cards alongside the 3DMark Time Spy Extreme performance of some previous-gen GPUs, to give an idea of relative performance. The hierarchy of graphics card performance scales along the same lines as our own measure of aggregated frame rate performance across the PC Gamer benchmarking suite at 1440p.
You may not have known, for example, that the Radeon RX 6700 XT (opens in new tab) can actually outperform the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (opens in new tab) a lot of the time, the same goes for the Radeon RX 6600 XT (opens in new tab) and GeForce RTX 3060 (opens in new tab). When we first reviewed the cards at their respective launches, the GeForce GPUs made more sense at their MSRP, but it’s taking longer for Nvidia’s mid-range cards to return to that level than AMD’s.
So, considering you can pick those Radeon cards up cheaper than the Nvidia ones, that’s where the smart money should be going.
