Enlarge / The Radeon RX 7900 XTX's three-fan cooler. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Nvidia's RTX 4080 and 4090 GPUs are amazing performers. They are also amazingly expensive, starting at $1,200 and $1,500 and going way up for cards from partners like MSI, Gigabyte, and Asus. The 4080 is nearly twice as expensive as the original $699 MSRP for the RTX 3080.
These price hikes are caused in part by pandemic-era concerns like supply chain snarls and inflation and partly by a cryptocurrency-fueled boom (now over, blessedly) that encouraged a network of scalpers to snap up every single high-end GPU they could. Also at play was a lack of competition and the increasing cost and complexity of building gigantic, monolithic chips on cutting-edge manufacturing processes. Today, AMD is trying to solve the latter two problems with the launch of its Radeon RX 7900 series GPUs.
At $899 and $999, the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX are still objectively expensive—but because they're not a further escalation over the starting price of the RX 6900 XT, both cards are what pass for a bargain in today's GPU market. If you're looking for cards that can consistently handle 4K gaming at 60 fps and higher, these GPUs do it for less than Nvidia's latest, and they're good enough and fast enough that they'll hopefully start driving Nvidia's prices down a bit, too.
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