Nvidia’s RTX 4060 is coming at the end of the month – and as a result, it seems that price-cutting in the entry level graphics card market is absolute carnage at the moment, to the point where we’ve even seen the potent RTX 3060 Ti available at sub-£300 prices. Meanwhile, the RTX 3060 – the world’s most popular GPU, according to the Steam Hardware Survey – is now available for well under £300/$300, pricing on Intel’s Arc A750 can deliver some preposterously good value, while last-gen AMD RDNA 2 cards are so cheap, it’s causing problems for the new RDNA 3-powered RX 7600.
So, initially, this piece was planned as a review for the RX 7600, but the more I looked at the surrounding GPUs in the market and the more I saw the extent of the price-cutting involved, the more I realised that this topic is exceptionally complex. The Radeon RX 7600 hasn’t been reviewed well, but it’s actually a very sound piece of hardware. The problem is that massive price-cuts on older cards are making its value proposition look less than compelling – and I’m going to be curious to see if this also has an impact on the upcoming RTX 4060, bearing in mind that its own gen-on-gen performance increases look relatively modest.
In addition to the price-cutting, another story started to emerge as the benchmark results coalesced. Intel’s Arc A750 and A770 are actually exceptionally good products when tasked with running modern games – and some of Intel’s own (limited time) price cuts translate into exceptional value. The retail price of the Arc A750 is £230/$250 – and yet as you’ll see on the following pages, the price vs performance ratio (particularly in RT heavy games) is off the charts, to the point where the RTX 4060 Ti looks severely over-priced. So, as well as being a look at a highly volative graphics marketplace, this article also serves as a re-examination of Intel Arc.
