Starting today, AMD is officially reducing the price of its mid-range Radeon RX 7700 XT GPU from its original $449 MSRP down to just $419. The new price drop will help alleviate the 7700 XT’s biggest weak spot and make it more competitive against Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti (especially the 16GB version). The $30 discount also puts more premium triple-fan options closer to the 7700 XT’s original price.
The RX 7700 XT is one of the latest RDNA3 GPUs to come out from AMD. It launched at $450 and features 54 SMs, 3456 cores, 54 RT acceleration units, 12GB of VRAM on a 192-bit bus, and a 240W TDP. In our review, we found the RX 7700 XT’s MSRP to be a huge weak spot for the GPU, that seriously affected its competitiveness against Nvidia and AMD’s own previous-generation parts.
AMD’s price cut down to $419 does a few things: For one it separates the 7700 XT away from the 7800 XT’s price, improving the 7700 XT’s relevance in the market. When it launched, the RX 7700 XT was only $50 cheaper than the RX 7800 XT, making the 7800 XT a lot more attractive offering. Now with its discount, the 7700 XT is almost $100 below the 7800 XT, giving it much better price separation.
Secondly, the $30 price cut now makes the 7700 XT a lot more competitive alternative to Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti series. Price to performance wise, the 7700 XT now blows the 16GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti out of the water, sporting faster performance (including ray-tracing) at a lower price. The cheapest 4060 Ti 16GB sits at around $450, while most models sit in the $470 price range.
The 7700 XT also performs exceptionally well against the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB. Believe it or not, in ray-tracing titles, the 7700 XT is not only faster than the 4060 Ti, it also shares almost identical performance value as the 4060 Ti. FPS-per-dollar, the 7700 XT at $419 sits at $6.790 per frame, while the 4060 Ti 8GB sits at $6.719 per frame, taking into account the cheapest units priced at $385. In rasterized games, the 7700 XT provides even more value than the 4060 Ti, being a full dollar ahead of the Nvidia GPU.
Our performance comparisons were taken from our review of the Radeon RX 7700 XT.
However, the RX 7700 XT is not out of the woods yet, it still has several problems it needs to content with, even at its $419 price. For one, AMD’s previous generation RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT are still selling at very competitive prices, with the 6800 selling at around $400 flat and the RX 6800 XT selling at around $450. As a reminder, the RX 6800 performs very similarly to the 7700 XT and has more VRAM. The RX 6800 XT is around 10% faster than the 7700 XT, and only costs $20 more than the 7700 XT at its new $419 price point.
On top of this, one minor issue also worth mentioning is the fact that AIB partner card’s of AMD’s RX 7700 XT have already been selling at $419 for some time now. For example, according to Newegg pricing, one of XFX’s triple-fan RX 7700 XT’s has already been put on sale for $419 before AMD announced its official discount for the GPU. This puts less impact on AMD’s price discount overall.
Seccondly, the 7700 XT still has to fight Nvidia’s popularity among mainstream gamers. In our RX 7700 XT review, we concluded that the RX 7700 XT would need to cost $400 or less to be a serious competitor in the mid-range GPU market. AMD’s $30 discount gets the RX 7700 XT halfway there, helping it beat the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB in raw performance and value. However, we’ve found that AMD’s GPUs need to be priced a bit lower than Nvidia’s GPUs if they have any hope of being super competitive. This is due to the fact that Nvidia has a lot more marketshare than AMD (and is thus more popular), and gamers tend to get swayed by Nvidia’s plethora of gaming-features such as DLSS 3, frame generation and upscaling.
As a result, the 7700 XT will likely still be seen as a mere alternative to the 4060 Ti, despite having superior hardware and raw performance now with its $30 price cut. But, once AMD finally gets rid of all its RDNA2 GPU supply, we hope it will drop the 7700 XT’s price further to $400 or less. Once there, the RX 7700 XT should be a much more attractive offering to mainstream buyers. But of course, Nvidia can always drop its price as well. That’s why, for consumers, competition is always a good thing.