AMD Slashes Price of Radeon RX 7900 XT in Response to Nvidia's RTX 40 SUPER Series Launch

AMD's Response to Nvidia's RTX 40 SUPER Series Launch

In response to the impending launch of Nvidia's RTX 40 SUPER Series graphics cards, AMD has taken a bold step by slashing the price of its high-end Radeon RX 7900 XT GPU.

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Hoping to get ahead of impending competition from Nvidia, AMD cut down the price of one of its high-end graphics cards, the Radeon RX 7900 XT. Though the Radeon RX 7900 XT was launched with an MSRP of $899, AMD cut the price down by over $100, with some partners offering deeper discounts to it.

The price cut from AMD arrived as its biggest competitor in the GPU market, Nvidia, prepared to launch the GeForce RTX 40 SUPER series. Starting at $599, the RTX 40 SUPER Series consists of the RTX 4070 SUPER, the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, and the RTX 4080 SUPER graphics cards. While the baseline RTX 4070 graphics card will coexist with its RTX 4070 SUPER counterpart, the RTX 4070 Ti and the RTX 4080 will be discontinued in favor of the SUPER variants once those models are released on January 24 and January 31 respectively.

But, the RTX 4080 SUPER will launch with a starting MSRP of $999 before taxes, and high-end cards from partners such as MSI and Asus can increase the cost well past the $1,000 mark.

AMD's Price Cut Strategy and Impact on Market

As a result of the RTX 40 SUPER Series' imminent arrival, AMD sought to take the initiative and give PC builders a more affordable alternative.

According to TweakTown, AMD discounted the Radeon RX 7900 XT to a new MSRP of $749, which is $150 less than its original price tag. On Newegg, the discounts run deeper, as the AsRock Phantom Gaming RX 7900 XT has a listed price of $709 at the time of writing. The discount on the Radeon RX 7900 XT came just before AMD's pending launch of the budget-friendly Radeon RX 7600 XT GPU.

Though AMD's graphics cards have focused on affordability, the ray tracing performance and FSR upscaling technology of Radeon GPUs have consistently lagged behind Nvidia's offerings. But one major upside to the Radeon RX 7900 XT, in addition to the price cut, is that it has 20GB of GDDR6 video memory, which is 4GB more than what the RTX 4080 SUPER and RTX 4070 Ti SUPER have. This allows for more raw rasterization power in graphically intense games such as Alan Wake 2 and Starfield. Between that and the price drop, the Radeon RX 7900 XT may be one of the top AMD cards to get in 2024.

AMD's Future Plans and Market Implications

With Zen 5 CPUs rumored to be in the works, the discount on the Radeon RX 7900 XT marks the start of a busy year for AMD. It remains to be seen how consumers will react to AMD's recent actions.