If you have not been following the news, AMD announced new cards to be sold at $380 and $450. nVidia responded by releasing “Super” versions of its 2060 and 2070 cards, priced at $400 and $500. This prompted AMD to lower the release price of its cards, to $350 and $400.
Let us take a look at the competition at each price point:
This is AMD’s biggest launch this year, and the number of sources covering this is huge! Alright, so where do we start? We are going to skip AMD’s GPUs for now (another update, soon) and look at the CPUs:
RAM prices took to the skies in 2017, and remained airborne throughout 2018. This year, RAM prices have landed, settled down, and are considering digging an underground cave in preparation for Armageddon, and are expected to go down even further.
nVidia’s recent run has been amazing! The four RTX 20xx cards, followed by the GTX 1660 Ti and 1660 non-Ti, have all been winners. These cards have had great power consumption, great temperatures, and low noise levels. More importantly, nVidia gave you the ultimate reason to buy them: They beat the competition in terms of power. If new cards came out and performed worse than old cards… who would buy them? Right?
So, nVidia is launching its latest (and cheapest) card in the 12nm series of cards. The GTX 1660, like the GTX 1660 Ti before it, has no RTX. However, it does let you play Witcher 3 on 60FPS+ on 1080p for $220. This new card beats all other AMD 5xx cards in its price range, and that includes the RX 590. It consumes less power, produces less heat, and less noise too. Considering the good price and stellar 1080p performance, this card ought to be a winner.
AMD’s Radeon VII has arrived! All hail the Radeon VII! But does it belong in our build chart?
So, the new RTX 2060 was revealed during CES, and now the benchmarks are out. Long story short: GTX 1070 to GTX 1080 performance for $350. So, you get last year’s $500 performance and save $150. That is pretty good! In fact, I would say that (due to its price) this card is probably going to be nVidia’s most popular RTX 20XX card. We are not all oil barons, nVidia!
It is not going to be easy to be kind to AMD for this one: The 590 is a refreshed 580, which itself is a refreshed 480.
The Witcher 3 1080p and 4K Benchmarks from TechPowerUp (source article linked below)
November 2017 was the last time we updated the GPU descriptions. We compared cards to the Titan XP, and had benchmarks for WoW and Witcher 3.
Now that it is November 2018, I have updated the base comparison GPU and the reference games.
