What can AMD Do?
What’s the answer? AMD will need to give the Radeon RX 6600 XT a price cut in the future. It’s the only way the Radeon RX 6600 XT will make sense. If it gets a price cut and is priced where it should be $299-$329 maximum, then it will truly provide an upgrade to the Radeon RX 5600 XT from 2020.
It will also provide great competition to the GeForce RTX 3060, seeing as it is generally faster. Otherwise, it’s not a good value, and that’s even considering you can get it exactly at MSRP these days. Realistically, it will be well above this pricing on the street, and that makes even less sense.
Final Points
Folks, if we show them that we will pay high prices for video cards, well beyond their MSRP, then that is exactly what you are going to get for the next generation. Prices are going to go up, cause they now know you’ll pay for it.
At the end of the day the Radeon RX 6600 XT performs similar to the Radeon RX 5700 XT, but it’s also close to the same price, so have we really made progress? The answer is a big NO. And that is only due to the price of the Radeon RX 6600 XT as it currently is. In terms of hardware performance, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is a huge gain, a huge leap, over the Radeon RX 5600 XT. However, that doesn’t matter when the cost of it has also been pushed $100 over what the Radeon RX 5600 XT was.
If the Radeon RX 6600 XT was $279 like the Radeon RX 5600 XT then the Radeon RX 6600 XT would be getting praised as raising the bar on performance for the price, it would be praised as a huge performance leap over last gen’s 1080p card, it would be praised as moving the industry forward. However, at $379, you just can’t give it the praise that it deserves. It’s solely down to the choice in price, simple as that.
Let’s face it everyone, the low-end affordable video card market for new video cards is eroding. The new price-point for mainstream video cards is now $400. Remember when $200 used to be the “sweet spot” as it was called? That no longer exists, and that’s what is happening. It was once said that the $200-$300 market should never be forgotten, and folks, it’s being forgotten, it’s happening right now.
The Problem is the Price, not the GPU