Why AMD cards provide better value for gamers

The sad state of the current market

Since the infamous crypto mining boom (and fall), we, the gamers, have had a hard time getting our hands on good value graphics cards. Both NVida and AMD have tried to milk the market by proposing small incremental bumps in performance for a marginally lower price. The days of the GTX 10-series and RX 5xx are long gone.

In this new era, where software optimization and artificial performance gains such as FSR and DLSS look to be the new standards, even in benchmarking, which brand provides the better value for money? And should you even upgrade into the current generation?

In this article we will compare the value for money both AMD and NVidia cards achieve, weighting the benefits of new technologies such as ray tracing and upscaling.

FSR, AFMF vs DLSS

DLSS (NVidia) and FSR (AMD) are both real-time upscaling and frame generation technologies, they allow you to render your game at a lower resolution to increase your FPS. These technologies are not recommended for full-HD gaming as the original image to upscale will be of bad quality but NVidia's DLSS offering will provide better quality. At 1440p and 4K however, the differences are much less noticeable, with DLSS still keeping an edge over AMD's FSR. DLSS 3 frame generation only works on NVidia RTX 40-series cards while FSR 3 works on any GPU from either AMD or their competitors, starting from the RX 590 or GTX 10-series.

AMD also released a driver that enables frame generation in any DirectX 11 and 12 game, the technology is called AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) but only works on RX 6000 and RX 7000 series of cards, this makes it very attractive as it enables games with no first-party frame generation support to enjoy high framerates.

Keep the above in mind when reading the next part of the article.

NVidia vs AMD value comparison

Disclaimer: This article is about gaming. Productivity performance is not being talked about in this article.

It has almost always been the case that AMD provides the better bang for the buck when it comes to pure rasterization performance and VRAM availability at a certain price point, with a few numbers below:

In 2016, the GTX 1060 6GB was available at 260-300$ at launch, and the RX 480 8GB was available at around 220-240$. For very similar performance, the AMD offering was superior due to a better price and more VRAM.

Ignoring the mining boom generation, we arrive at the present, the RTX 40 and RX 7000 series. As a disclaimer, I currently own both an NVidia GTX 1650 and an AMD RX 7600. NVidia has gone down the path of giving the worst value for money generation on generation and have agressively tried to shift the market standard to higher priced cards, such as moving the 70-class cards up by a few hundred dollars.

The RTX 4070 launched at 600$ and now retails for 550$. However, I can't blame them for trying to eat up a market where AMD was lacking for the past year, having only recently released the RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT.

But now that these new AMD cards have launched, the market is starting to get more interesting and we can only hope that it starts a price war, especially since Intel jumped into this market.

As NVidia just released the SUPER variants of their cards we can expect some noticeable gains in value in the next few months. Below are a few comparisons of graphics cards and their counterparts in terms of value.

In the next sections we will explore the hottest cards this generation and give you a better understanding of the market.

AMD RX 7600 vs NVidia RTX 4060 - The starters

The RX 7600 is available for ~260$ and the RTX 4060 for ~290$. At this price point only rasterization performance matters, ray tracing is abysmal on both of these models, for RT workloads an RTX 4070 Ti or superior is required.

According to this post, the additional price of the RTX 4060 justifies less than 10% average increases. Note that Call of Duty has much better performance on AMD this generation.

At this price point, buy whichever you want, both work well but don't provide much performance uplift from the last generation and ray tracing will not be available. NVidia DLSS 3 may also be preferable for single player games, but FSR 3 is also starting to be implemented in multiple games.

For professional workloads such as blender, the RTX series are much faster, but improvements are happening on the AMD side as well.

• Buy the AMD RX 7600 here
• Buy the NVidia RTX 4060 here

AMD RX 7800 XT vs NVidia RTX 4070 SUPER - Upper mid-range

The RTX 4070 SUPER comes at an MSRP of 600$, but amazon prices put it at 610-650$ and has only 12 GB VRAM. The RX 7800 XT on the other hand only costs ~500$ and boasts 16 GB of VRAM, making it a sound future-proof investment as games have readily been eating up more and more VRAM.

While the NVidia card outperforms AMD's in ray tracing, in normal 1080p, 1440p and 4K, performance is less than 5% close with a few edge cases for a much cheaper product from AMD. If you don't care about ray tracing buy the AMD card for cheaper and ensure the longevity of your build thanks to more VRAM.

• Buy the AMD RX 7800 XT here
• Buy the NVidia RTX 4070 SUPER here

AMD RX 7900 XT vs NVidia RTX 4070 Ti SUPER - For high performance

This one is a no-brainer, as a multiplayer gamer you want the best raster performance for the money, ray tracing is still new technology and kills performance on GPUs even at this price point and would recommend not to buy into the hype until things start to settle. The RX 7900 XT retails for 720$ to 760$ whilst the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER is more than 800$, sometimes reaching 870$ on certain models. According to this source the RX 7900 XT performs 5-9% better in rasterized rendering. If you don't care about either ray tracing or DLSS 3, I highly suggest the AMD card. AMD recently released their fluid motion frames in their drivers allowing for frame generation in any DirectX 11 and 12 game.

• Buy the AMD RX 7900 XT here
• Buy the NVidia RTX 4070 Ti SUPER here

AMD RX 7900 XTX vs NVidia RTX 4080 SUPER - Enthusiasts need this

The RTX 4080 SUPER sounds amazing on paper, 1000$ MSRP, but in reality it's not available at these prices, going for around 1150$. With only 16 GB of VRAM at this price point, it makes me doubtful of this card's future for 1440p+ gaming. Some games already sip 12+ GB at these resolutions, maybe those games are not optimized but the hardware is not evolving at a rapid enough pace.

The RX 7900 XTX cards are going at 920$-960$ and are a great value proposition for enthusiasts.

The 4080 SUPER and 7900 XTX trade blows between non-raytraced games in terms of performance, but the AMD variant costs less and has 24 GB of VRAM which takes it to another level for longevity.

• Buy the AMD RX 7900 XTX

Conclusion

For all noteworthy cards in the mid to high range, AMD clearly presents a better value for rasterized native performance, since ray tracing is recommended only for 600$+ GPUs and it drastically kills performance in games it has been discarded as an advantage. DLSS and FSR/AFMF provide added value to a card but should not be used as a baseline to compare them, however DLSS is superior for the games that support it.

I have provided the links above to buy most of the mentioned cards.

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