Concurrent with the launch of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE last week, AMD announced an official price cut for the RX 7700 XT, bringing it down to $419. This increased its appeal over its main competitor, the RTX 4060 Ti. However, the RTX 4060 Ti has also dropped in price, with several 8GB models well below the $400 mark. [Of course, the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is clearly an attractive RTX 4060 Ti variant, but its price has stubbornly remained higher than the 8GB version until now.

Tom's Hardware found an attractive deal on the MSI RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Ventus 3X model; the original $100 premium for the 16GB has shrunk dramatically; and the 16GB is now available for a mere $100. There is also a gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Windforce model, which will cost $429 with the addition of a $20 promo code. This will revive the pressure on the RX 7700 XT, and it won't be long before one or both models can be purchased for under $400. At that point, the value proposition for both cards will be much better.

The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is by no means a bad card. However, the $499 price tag didn't make much sense; the extra 8GB of memory couldn't justify $100 more than the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, given that the added VRAM is the only difference between the two cards. I believed it was the weakest card of the Ada Lovelace generation, but now that it has dropped toward the $400 mark, it deserves a re-evaluation. [But it is more interesting now because both AMD and Nvidia are probably a year away from launching their successors, and if this GPU goes below $400 during 2024, many Gamers will be forced to replace aging cards like the RTX 2060 and RX 580, which often underperform on the latest titles.

This is the beauty of competition: if Nvidia and AMD fight it out, gamers win; Nvidia still controls the graphics card market, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon, so AMD will need to be aggressive to increase card sales.

The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB and RX 7700 XT appeal with their 16GB and 12GB frame buffers, respectively. Also, with games like GTA 6 coming in the future, not a small number of RTX 4060 Ti 16GB and RX 7700 XT will be tasked with running the most demanding games when the eye-candy is up.

The mid-range GPU market looks as healthy as it did before the Ethereum mining boom began.