THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...

THE GPU MARKET is hard to keep up with these days, especially in terms of pricing. But the upside is that there are now some very interesting, if often fleeting, deals to be had. That’s a welcome change from 18 months to two years of hideously high pricing during the pandemic.

Anyway, here’s one we’d like to swing past you. How about an AMD Radeon 6700 XT 12GB for $320, including a copy of Starfield? If you were going to buy Starfield anyway, take $70 off, making the effective price $250.

Into our AMD rig it goes. Sure, it’s last-gen versus the Radeon RX 7600 it replaces, but critically, it has 12GB, where the 7600 has just 8GB. 8GB is becoming an increasing limitation, even at 1080p. Moreover, the new RX 7000 range brings very little in terms of new technologies. Dollar-for-dollar, it’s not any better at ray tracing than the old RX 6000 family, so it’s really just a question of raw performance, and the 6700 XT is a solid 30 percent faster. But it’s not nearly 30 percent more expensive.