Pick your weapon: AMD's previous-generation Radeon RX 6700 XT or Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 4060 Ti" In terms of pure raster performance, the difference is not that great. Therefore, it is almost certain that the RX 6700 XT will have a significant lead over Nvidia's upcoming RTX 4060, which has not yet been released but was just brought forward by Nvidia on June 29.

After all, Nvidia has hacked down CUDA from 4,352 on the 4060 Ti to just 3,072 for the plain RTX 4060. Yikes. Anyway, the important thing to note here is that ASRock's AMD RX 6700 XT is available at Newegg for just $310. This is only slightly higher than the RTX 4060's launch price of $299.

Nvidia's DLSS scaling technology is superior to AMD's FSR. However, as we found with the RTX 4060 Ti, the frame generation bits of DLSS 3 do not work as well on smaller GPUs as they do on the more powerful RTX 40 series GPUs.

If this is also true for the RTX 4060, which is even smaller than the RTX 4060 Ti, then DLSS 3 is unlikely to save the RTX 4060. Furthermore, considering the 4060's 128-bit bus and 8GB of VRAM, the comparison to the 192-bit, 12GB RX 6700 XT only gets worse. [It is also worth remembering that the RX 6700 XT is unlikely to suddenly become largely obsolete when the successor to the RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7000 series arrives; as the RX 7900 XT and XTX first demonstrated and then confirmed with the RX 7600, AMD's latest GPU architecture offers some performance gains. However, it is not a major technological leap forward. [For example, RDNA 3 does not dramatically close the gap with Nvidia with respect to ray tracing performance. For these reasons, buy the RX 6700 XT now, and you probably won't suffer from buyer's remorse when the new RX 7700 XT arrives on the scene.

In any case, the $300-plus RX 6700 XT will definitely get our vote as an affordable option that delivers 1440p performance there.