AMD's gaming promotion department is continuing its battle with NVIDIA in the GPU VRAM pricing wars. Sasa Marinkovic, a senior director at Team Red, tweeted out a statement that their 16 GB gaming experience starts at $499. He included a chart that compares part of the AMD Radeon GPU range against a couple of NVIDIA GeForce RTX cards, emphasizing pricing and VRAM allotments. The infographic shows AMD's first official declaration of the RX 6800 GPU bottoming out at $499, an all-time low, as well as a hefty cut affecting the old range-topping RX 6950 XT, now available for $649. The RX 6800 XT sits in-between at $579, but the RX 6900 XT did not get a slot on the chart.
AMD's latest move against NVIDIA in the video memory size stake is nothing new. Earlier this month, it encouraged potential customers to select one of its pricey current generation RX 7900 XT or XTX GPUs because they pack more onboard VRAM than equivalent GeForce RTX models, making them future-proofed for increasingly memory-hungry games. The latest marketing did not account for board partner variants of the RX 7900 XT GPU selling for as low as $762 this week. AMD did not include any of Intel's offerings in the comparison chart, but Team Blue's Arc A770 16 GB graphics card can be purchased for $350, although it cannot trade blows performance-wise with the $499 RX 6800 GPU.
AMD is currently 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?
