AMD’s RX 7900 GPUs are finally available to purchase, but you can’t actually buy them yet. The company is still working on finalizing the supply chain for the cards. The RX 7900 series is AMD’s latest line of graphics cards, and they’re designed to compete with Nvidia’s GTX 1060 and 1070 cards. The RX 7900 series offers a lot of improvements over AMD’s previous cards, including better performance and more features. The first card in the series, the RX 7900, is available now. It has a price tag of $499 US, which is a bit higher than some of Nvidia’s other cards. However, the RX 7900 offers a lot of benefits that make it worth buying. One big advantage of the RX 7900 series is its performance. The card is able to handle games at resolutions up to 4K resolution without any problems. In fact, some games are even able to run at higher resolutions than what was originally intended by the developers. Another big benefit of the RX 7900 series is its compatibility with VR headsets. Most VR headsets require high-end graphics cards to work properly, but the RX 7900series can handle most VR games without any problems. This means that most people who buy an RX7900 will be able to use it with their VR headset without any issues whatsoever. ..
Both the Radeon RX 7900 XT and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX are now available for purchase… sorta. The 7900 XT starts at $900, while the 7900 XTX starts at $1,000. Both cards are competitors to the NVIDIA RTX 4080 and the RTX 4090 respectively, and while testing shows NVIDIA’s alternatives still have a slight edge in a number of games and scenarios, AMD’s cards are clearly the more sensible options. After all, the RTX 4080 starts at $1,200, and the RTX 4090 costs a whopping $1,600.
It looks like the cheaper price point is resulting in higher interest for the cards, too. The cards went on sale and almost instantly sold out — whoops. The cards are also currently being sold by scalpers for 50% and even 100% markups.
We should note here that GPU stock is far from normal right now, as NVIDIA is also struggling to keep its cards in stock even as GPU cryptocurrency mining is largely extinct now. We’ll have to see how they fare as far as stock goes over the next weeks. As of now, reseller markups on NVIDIA cards aren’t that brutal (roughly 30% at most), perhaps signaling that resellers are having a hard time getting rid of them and that retailer stock is about to normalize.
AMD’s new cards are close to NVIDIA’s options and they cost much less, so they’ll definitely have a higher demand, at least initially. NVIDIA is also considering price reductions for its just-launched GPUs as well.
If you want a sensible, yet powerful GPU, AMD’s RDNA 3 cards sound like a solid option. Just hope for stock to come back at some point.
Source: ExtremeTech
