It's actually happening: cheap graphics card deals have returned in force. It might not be that every great GPU is now under MSRP, but a great deal of AMD's RDNA 2 cards are. That means genuinely affordable budget GPUs for 1080p and 1440p gaming and the red team's top 4K cards for dramatically under MSRP. You can also save a little bit on some of Nvidia's RTX 30-series, at least versus what you would've been paying this time last year for one, but nowhere near as much.
It's been a while, but the supply chain situation has finally gotten better, stock is flowing, and cryptocurrency miners are no longer buying up every GPU in sight, thanks to events like the Merge (opens in new tab) and the generally low value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
This time of year we also welcome the arrival of Cyber Monday graphics card deals (opens in new tab), of which there are actually many. Mostly on AMD cards again, though.
We're also on the precipice of a brand new GPU generation from AMD, and Nvidia's already began rolling out its Ada Lovelace GPUs with the pricey but impressive RTX 4090 (opens in new tab). These releases are beginning to cause some price reductions on both Nvidia and AMD's high-end, most notably the latter, but you do want to be careful not to spend too much on a card that's about to be replaced by something better.
- We're curating all the best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals (opens in new tab) right here.
Basically, if you're looking to spend $800 or more right now, you're better off waiting around for next-gen GPUs.
At the budget side of the equation you don't have to worry about a next-gen replacement anytime soon, however. We don't expect to see any entry-level or mid-tier next-gen cards for a while. That means you can pick up an RX 6650 XT or RX 6600 with some confidence you're getting a good deal right now—and those two cards are especially cheap right now.
Where are the best Cyber Monday graphics card deals?
In the US:
- Amazon - save up to $200 on current-gen Nvidia & AMD graphics cards (opens in new tab)
- Best Buy - the only place to buy Founders Edition cards in the US (opens in new tab)
- Walmart - RTX 3070 discounts up to $200 (opens in new tab)
- B&H Photo - discounts of up to $500 on select GPUs (opens in new tab)
- Newegg - save over 20% on the list price of AMD graphics cards (opens in new tab)
- RTX 3080 - Yeston RTX 3080 |
$1,099$769 at Newegg (save $330) (opens in new tab) - RTX 3060 Ti - Zotac RTX 3060 Ti Amp White |
$409.99$389.99 at Newegg (save $20) (opens in new tab) - RTX 3060 - MSI RTX 3060 Aero |
$369.99$315.99 (save $54) (opens in new tab) - RX 6750 XT - MSI Mech RX 6750 XT |
$549.99$369.99 at Newegg (save $180 after rebate) (opens in new tab) - RX 6700 XT - PowerColor Fighter RX 6700 XT |
$399.99$359.99 at Amazon (save $40) (opens in new tab) - RX 6700 - XFX Speedster SWFT309 RX 6700 |
$399.99$309.99 at Best Buy (save $50) (opens in new tab) - RX 6650 XT - MSI Mech RX 6650 XT |
$280$249.99 at Amazon (save $30.01) (opens in new tab) - RX 6600 - PowerColor Fighter RX 6600 | 8GB |
$259.99$209.99 at Amazon (save $50) (opens in new tab)
Graphics card deals
Cheap graphics card deals
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(opens in new tab)What to look out for
AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT
Stream Processors: 2,048
Base clock: 2,055MHz
Boost clock: 2,635MHz
TFLOPs: 10.79
Memory: 8GB GDDR6
Memory clock: 17.5Gbps
Memory bandwidth: 280.3GB/s
AMD's Radeon RX 6600 XT launched with its heart set on toppling Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti, or get close to it. Sadly, it wasn't quite there at the time, and with a price tag of $379 it became a hard sell. However, AMD later followed up that launch with the RX 6650 XT, which is a moderately (slightly) faster version of the RX 6600 XT. What's even better than that is nowadays the RX 6650 XT is dramatically cheaper than its Nvidia competition and well under its MSRP. Hallelujah!
So now AMD's RX 6650 XT is by far the better buy than anything it's up against. AMD's affordable GPUs have matured like fine wine. Which is absolutely classic behaviour for AMD.
The AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT features the Navi 23 GPU; one of its second-gen Navi chips based on the seriously impressive RDNA 2 architecture. It's another TSMC N7 (7nm) graphics processor, but the smallest of all the current-gen AMD GPUs. Despite its small scale, though, it packs in more transistors than even the most powerful of the first generation Navi cards, the Navi 10 chip at the heart of the RX 5700 XT.
When it comes to speeds and feeds we're talking about a chip with 32 Compute Units (CUs) at its heart, with a total of 2,048 stream processors. The same as the RX 6600 XT. However, it's capable of hitting a max clock speed of a blistering 2,635MHz, which is wildly quick by anyone's standards.
AMD's RX 6650 XT is by far the better buy than anything it's up against.
For that speed, it confidently beats Nvidia's cheapest Ampere GPU, the RTX 3060, across the board. That's important as it's actually competing with, and consistently beating, the RTX 3060 on price.
The best showing for the newest Navi GPU is at its 1080p target resolution. That's generally been the case for AMD's cards compared to their Nvidia competition this time around. It's plenty capable at 1440p, too, though you might want a bit more power if you intend to operate a 4K screen.
The RX 6650 XT is definitely one to look out for in the lead up to Black Friday and during the busy shopping period. It's already going cheap, yes, but at under $300 this would be an absolute steal. Even right now it's going for as little as $260, so fingers crossed it gets even cheaper still.
Read our full AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT review (opens in new tab).
AMD Radeon RX 6600
Stream Processors: 1,792
Base clock: 1,626MHz
Boost clock: 2,491MHz
TFLOPs: 8.9
Memory: 8GB GDDR6
Memory clock: 14GT/s
Memory bandwidth: 224GB/s
It's not been a great few years to buy into PC gaming or build your own machine. However, things are finally improving. Stock can still be hit or miss, but prices have started to become reasonable again.
That's far more true of AMD's graphics cards than Nvidia's right now, and no more so than in the budget lineup. The RX 6600 wasn't super impressive to us at launch, considering it asked the same amount of cash as an RTX 3060 12GB but was often beaten by the green team's card. However, it's now much, much cheaper. It's even cheaper than Nvidia's RTX 3050, which makes it a much smarter buy than both cards.
It's even cheaper than Nvidia's RTX 3050.
There's always the threat of Nvidia here, as if it ever did drop its prices on the RTX 3060 12GB, it'd be the better pick. AMD card comes with 4GB less VRAM, often lower gaming performance, and one of its more valuable features, FidelityFX Super Resolution, is available cross-vendor. However, we've not seen any sign of Nvidia doing much about its high prices right now.
The RX 6600 is plenty capable of 1080p gaming in the modern age, don't fret about that. It's built using AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, which is still, just about, the top dog out of the Radeon camp. One day soon it'll be replaced by the RDNA 3 architecture, but that'll be only the high-end cards arriving at first—the RX 6600 has a lot of life left in it yet.
Read our full AMD Radeon RX 6600 review (opens in new tab).
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
CUDA cores: 4,864
Base clock: 1,410MHz
Boost clock: 1,665MHz
TFLOPs: 16.20
Memory: 8GB GDDR6
Memory clock: 14GT/s
Memory bandwidth: 448GB/s
The best value Ampere to date, the RTX 3060 Ti is very closely related to the RTX 3070. Both utilize the same GA104 GPU (the RTX 3060 Ti has fewer SMs enabled), with the same 8GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit bus.
While 17% less capable in core count than its pricier sibling, the RTX 3060 Ti makes up for it with some judicious GPU Boost frequencies. That partially explains why the RTX 3060 Ti can be within 17% to just single digits off the pace of the RTX 3070, despite operating at a silicon disadvantage. Not bad for a $399 card (if you can find it for that price).
If you haven't already done the maths: At $399, the RTX 3060 Ti is 20% cheaper than the RTX 3070, so performance per dollar is on the up with the diminutive graphics card. That's why we love it so; it's a great GPU for the full stack of resolutions and has decent ray tracing capability to boot, courtesy of second-generation RT Cores.
The RTX 3060 Ti delivers gaming performance that's rather stupendous.
The RTX 3060 Ti delivers gaming performance that's rather stupendous when you look at generational gains over even the RTX 20-series—next to the GTX 10-series, it's quite frightening, actually. There's exceptional 1080p and 1440p performance in a tiny package here, the likes of which would've set you back something close to twice as much cash a couple of years ago. And that's pretty great.
The Nvidia extras can help here too—DLSS, Reflex, and even Nvidia Broadcast all add to the overall experience. There's a solid base of genuinely great features behind RTX and the Nvidia package that's only been improved upon with Ampere, none more so than the ray-tracing performance for that matter.
Read our full Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti review (opens in new tab) (Founders Edition).
Performance comparison
Every new GPU generation offers new features and possibilities. But rasterized rendering is still the most important metric for general gaming performance across the PC gaming world. Sure, Nvidia GPUs might well be better at the ray tracing benchmarks they more or less instigated, but when it comes to standard gaming performance AMD's latest line up can certainly keep pace.
It's also worth noting that the previous generation of graphics cards do still have something to offer, with something like the GTX 1650 Super able to outpace a more modern RTX 3050 in most benchmarks.
We're not saying you should buy an older card in 2022—AMD's budget RX 6000-series is a much better deal today—but it's worth knowing where your current GPU stacks up, or just knowing the lie of the land. But there is also the fact there will be gaming rigs on sale with older graphics cards over the next few days, and if they're cheap enough they may still be worth a punt as a cheap entry into PC gaming.
We've benchmarked all the latest GPUs of this generation, and have tracked their performance against the previous generation in terms of 3DMark Time Spy Extreme scores. Where we don't have the referential numbers for an older card we have used the average index score from the UL database. These figures track alongside an aggregated 1440p frame rate score from across our suite of benchmarks.
MSRP list
Here's a list of the manufacturer set retail prices (MSRP), or recommended retail price (RRP), for most the latest graphics cards. For the most part, these are the set prices for the stock or reference versions of these cards, if applicable, and not representative of overclocked or third-party graphics cards, which may well be priced higher.
Nvidia
- RTX 4090 - $1,599 | £1,699
- RTX 4080 16GB - $1,199 | £1,269
- RTX 3090 Ti - $1,999 | ~£1,999
- RTX 3090 - $1,499 | £1,399
- RTX 3080 Ti - $1,199 | £1,049
- RTX 3080 - $699 | £649
- RTX 3070 Ti - $599 | £529
- RTX 3070 - $499 | £469
- RTX 3060 Ti - $399 | £349
- RTX 3060 - $329 | £299
- RTX 3050 - $249 | £239
AMD
- RX 6950 XT - $1,099 | ~£1,060
- RX 6900 XT - $999 | ~£770
- RX 6800 XT - $649 | ~£600
- RX 6800 - $579 | ~£530
- RX 6750 XT - $549 | ~£530
- RX 6700 XT - $479 | ~£420
- RX 6650 XT - $399 | ~£389
- RX 6600 XT - $379 | ~£320
- RX 6600 - $329 | ~£299
- RX 6500 XT - $199 | ~£180
