XFX’s Speedster MERC 310 model of the AMD RX 7900 XTX GPU is falling in price across multiple retailer sites in the UK and US, amidst rumors of Nvidia’s imminent RTX 5000 series reveal.
It’s available for $879.99 (was $929.99) on Newegg in the US and £789.99 (was £899.99) on eBuyer in the UK – as an added bonus, the Newegg deal has a game bundle containing Unknown 9: Awakening and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. While the discounts are much better for PC gamers in the UK for now, we could see more price drops in the near future with AMD ditching high-end GPUs – not to mention the fact that Black Friday is now on the horizon.
This isn’t the first time that AMD’s top-of-the-line GPU’s price has dropped significantly in price, as we saw it fall below $850 for the first time ever earlier this year. This stands in direct opposition to Nvidia’s competing flagship GPU (the RTX 4090), which has seen much smaller discounts since its 2022 release – based on Nvidia’s current success, I expect this to continue with the RTX 5000 series GPUs, after the inevitable wave of post-release scalping.
It might be time to give AMD’s GPU a chance…
While it’s clear that Nvidia’s RTX 4080 Super and 4090 are more popular options, I’d say you shouldn’t scoff at the RX 7900 XTX. Perhaps, the most appealing aspect of Nvidia’s GPUs is DLSS, which when compared to AMD’s FSR has somewhat weaker image quality when utilizing its upscaling modes.
I don’t think this alone should be a reason to totally ignore the RX 7900 XTX, especially since it sits alongside the 4080 Super in gaming performance across a plethora of titles (even outperforming it in some). The major downside is its ray-tracing performance, which struggles to provide consistent frame rates at higher resolutions – conversely, Nvidia’s GPUs have nailed this, at least within the RTX 4000 series.
Fortunately, it provides high-level performance outside of ray-traced games, with consistent frame rates over 100fps at 4K when using FSR with Fluid Motion Frames (AMD’s software for generating and inserting additional frames, which has its own rival in Nvidia’s DLSS Frame Generation).
Even with Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series reveal no doubt coming sometime in the near future, there’s a high chance that prices for both of the brand’s current high-end GPUs will remain unchanged for now – at least, until Black Friday. If you aren’t too bothered by poor ray-tracing performance and can deal with the weaker performance of FSR in comparison to DLSS, the RX 7900 XTX is certainly worth a shot.
