It has been a very long time coming. But AMD's previous generation of large GPUs is now available at an affordable price: the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (opens in new tab) sells for about $550, sometimes even less. Earlier this week, it was selling for $520 on Amazon.

If you recall, the 6800 XT uses the RDNA 2 generation of Big Navi, which was the best GPU AMD had available until the new Radeon 7900 series GPUs (opens in new tab) came out a few months ago.

Furthermore, it was only a short time ago that the 6800 XT hit a four-figure price tag. In other words, $550 is not a great deal, but it is somehow affordable. Furthermore, the 6800 XT remains a beast of a GPU.

Performance-wise, it is nearly on par with the Nvidia RTX 3080 12GB in traditional raster games. Admittedly, things get more complicated when ray tracing and upscaling enter the mix.

This is especially true when comparing the 6800 XT to Nvidia's latest RTX 40 series GPUs: the 4070 Ti is at least $799, usually more, and at least about 40% more expensive when used as a comparison.

For simple raster performance, i.e., most games, the 4070 Ti is only 15-20% faster than the 6800 XT. In other words, its value proposition is clear. But what about when upscaling is taken into account?

Nvidia's DLSS is probably still better than AMD's FSR. However, we would argue that upscaling works better on 4K panels than on 1440p panels. In many cases, it is hard to tell that DLSS is running on a 4K panel, and it really does look like it is native.

On 1440p panels, however, it is usually more obvious that DLSS or FSR is enabled and not as crisp as natively. So if your gaming monitor is 1440p, native performance is definitely quite important.

Of course, the more expensive Nvidia option still has its advantages, as it can also perform DLSS frame generation without DLSS 3 scaling. But this is a serious step up, and if $500 or so is your budget ceiling, the 6800 XT is a ridiculous purchase by recent GPU standards.

If you can't stretch your budget that far, interestingly, it's AMD that should have your cash now: the 6700 XT is a decent gaming GPU, not a skimpy, memory-bus skimpy cutout; it can be had for around $350 and delivers excellent 1440p performance in many games.

Just at the budget end of the scale for a real gaming GPU, it is still the AMD we recommend. The plain Radeon RX 6600 is available for $225 and delivers 1080p performance there on the latest titles.

In short, the GPU market is not as depressing as you might think. However, there are options at somewhat acceptable price points that didn't even exist six months ago, let alone more than a year ago.