At the end of last year, graphics card prices fluctuated widely. Most of them were in the entry-level market, which admittedly is more important to many people than the ultra-enthusiast GPUs that cost upwards of $1,000. In the midst of that shakeup, the price of AMD's RX 6000 series of graphics cards crashed, giving what was fairly average performance at launch a whole new lease of life.

In fact, the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (opens in new tab) is now cheaper than Nvidia's RTX 3060. The Red Team RX 6700 XT can be picked up on Newegg (opens in new tab) for $350. This is a card with gaming performance on par with the RTX 3060 Ti (opens in new tab) and cheaper than its less expensive sibling, the RTX 3060.

The RX 6700 XT even outperformed the RTX 3070 (open in new tab) in some games in initial launch testing; in games that favor AMD's silicon, such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the card's performance at 1080p at 1080p.

The point is that the RX 6700 XT remains a great choice for mid-range gaming PCs, with discounts on par with last year's Black Friday (open in new tab). And there is no doubt that it is still a fully capable graphics card in 2023; AMD's GPUs have evolved significantly across the board, running on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture and adding support for real-time ray tracing. Sure, the RX 6700 XT doesn't always have the performance to turn on these demanding graphics settings, but it's nice to have the option. The RX 6700 XT also comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, which is more than the RTX 3070.

If you can't give up your green dreams and need an Nvidia graphics card for your machine, we recommend getting the RTX 3060 Ti now, as the RTX 3060 doesn't perform as well as we'd like at its current price of about $360, and it's $20 It is much easier to recommend buying the RTX 3060 Ti (opens in new tab), which is $40 to $40 more expensive.

That said, the fact remains that Nvidia's mid-range and budget RTX 30 series cards are not offering value for money right now versus AMD's price-reduced RX 6000 series. So far, we have not seen much of a rebuttal from Nvidia. This is because Nvidia still has a significant portion of the market share, and arguably much of it is pre-installed in pre-built PCs.

Nvidia seems intent on keeping the RTX 30 series around a bit longer, despite the recent launch of the RTX 40 series. RTX 4070 Ti is the cheapest card in Nvidia's latest generation, at $799. AMD is in a similar situation, and so far has only released the RX 7000 AMD is in a similar situation, having only released the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT in the RX 7000 series so far. On the mobile side, both AMD and Nvidia are about to launch cheaper alternatives.

If you don't want to wait for this to start happening, the RX 6700 XT gets my vote as the mid-range graphics card to buy in the meantime.