An unnamed AMD partner claims that as a result of the recent Nvidia Ampere RTX 30 series announcement, the Red Team is expected to reduce the cost of 16GB AMD Radeon RX 6000 series cards to better compete with the new GeForce GPUs.

The new RTX 3080 and especially the RTX 3070 have increased the pressure on the soon-to-be announced AMD RDNA 2 "Big Navi" GPUs. These new Radeon RX 6000 series cards will likely be released in October along with the new AMD Zen 3 CPUs, but are still purely in the rumor stage while waiting for Lisa Su and Co. to remove the wrapper on the next generation hardware.

Since the Nvidia RTX 3080 will reportedly launch at $699 with twice the gaming performance of the RTX 2080, and the RTX 3070 will reportedly launch at $499 while outperforming the RTX 2080 Ti itself, AMD is hoping the RDNA 2-based RX 6000 series will have some work to do to be able to compete in both price and performance.

And it looks like the top card will be somewhere between these two Nvidia cards, and possibly closer to the RTX 3070 if recent rumors are to be believed.

A source from one of AMD's partner card manufacturers told Coreteks (via HotHardware) that: "They (AMD) want to release 16GB for $599... But after Ampere's announcement, I expect the 16GB to be $549 ... We are receiving the ASIC (GPU + MEM) this month (Sept) "

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Coreteks' original tweet stated that there is also an 8GB RX 6000 series card, but a subsequent message noted that something got lost in translation and as far as they know there is no 8GB version of that particular top Radeon card.

Be prepared to take this with a grain of salt, because if the possibility of a price shift is indeed true, we won't know until AMD actually announces a new GPU. Existing rumors indicate that the flagship Big Navi card's gaming performance outperforms the RTX 2080 Ti, but only by about 15% in a best-case scenario.

This would put it behind the RTX 3080, and AMD may want to make sure there is enough of a price difference between the two to make the second generation RDNA cards more attractive. At least at $150 less than the RTX 3080, it would be a very attractive GPU, especially if the performance were not so far apart.

However, it also needs to be significantly faster than the $499 RTX 3070.

The RTX 3070 is the card most likely to be released around the same time, and is said to be capable of outperforming the RTX 2080 Ti. In addition, there are rumors of a 16GB RTX 3070 Ti waiting in the wings, presumably to be put directly against the RDNA 2 card if needed.

The new AMD RX 6000 series GPUs will likely have to tread a very fine line between two new GeForce cards to find the right place. However, from the current rumors, it appears to be a genuinely competitive card and could still be a winner if AMD gets it in the right position.