- Nvidia’s 40-series budget GPUs have disappointed, mainly due to their lackluster performance and insanely high prices.
- The Intel GPUs, however, have improved ever since their weak launch but are still not quite as good.
- After dominating the budget GPU segment for a while, AMD is also struggling to provide the generational leap consumers deserve.
Tech has been getting expensive lately due to global chip shortages and other worldly problems. And this has affected the budget category the most. Many people like me who do not have big budgets for flagship-tier PCs rely on the budget offerings to play the games we love.
With the chip shortage in mind, current budget GPU offerings from every GPU manufacturer have been awful and not as great as their predecessors.
Nvidia Being Nvidia
Ever since Nvidia released its RTX 3000 series of GPUs, they’ve ignored the budget segment. The RTX 3060 was the starting point for Nvidia to ruin the budget-friendly xx60 series GPUs.
The current xx60 GPUs built on the Ada Lovelace architecture make it much worse. The xx60 GPUs used to be Nvidia’s best-selling GPUs, like the GTX 1060 and even the RTX 2060.
The RTX 4060 is Nvidia’s most current budget graphics card and is equipped with only 8 GB of video memory as well as inferior memory bandwidth and memory bus. Remember that it’s even less than its predecessor, which came out with 12 GB.
Not only that, it also costs $300, which to me seems like a lot for a GPU of this caliber. The card also doesn’t perform any better than its predecessor, just like its bigger brother, the RTX 4060 Ti.
The RTX 4060 Ti comes in two variants, one with 8 GB of VRAM and the other rocking 16 GB, but comes at the price of a mid-range graphics card. $500 for a budget graphics card says a lot about how unbothered Nvidia is about its budget-friendly segment.
I would rather buy one of the RTX 3000 series graphics cards at highly discounted prices instead.
Intel Arc GPUs are Still Not There Yet
Intel’s entry into the GPU competition with its Arc-series lineup was surprising and concerning at the same time. They entered the market a little too late, where the other two companies had already established a strong base for themselves. Intel didn’t try to go after the flagship cards and chose to target the budget segment.
Even there, Intel had a hard time with the rough launch in Q1 of 2022. Their first-generation graphics cards suffered from poor driver support, which caused numerous bugs and performance issues in the games.
Since then, Intel has tirelessly worked to fix all the driver-related issues so that users could use the full potential of their cards. Fast-forward to today, and the Intel Arc cards now perform a lot better than they did at launch.
Their A770 features 16 GB of VRAM and performs head-to-head with the RTX 3060 and the RTX 4060 while being priced at just around $275.
Intel still has tons of work left to do on the Arc lineup; it’s not finished yet, and with future updates, the optimization will continue to improve performance and stability. They must also ensure that their next generation of graphics cards does not suffer the same fate as the Alchemist series.
AMD is Somewhat Better, But Not Perfect
After successfully dominating the budget segment for two generations, AMD is also having a hard time offering the same great performance as the RX 5000 and 6000 series graphics cards. AMD’s new 7000 series budget GPUs aren’t that impressive.
Especially the RX 7600 and 7600 XT, the RX 7600 was launched with an MSRP of $270 and offers little to no improvement in performance compared to its predecessor.
As for the 7600 XT, this GPU does offer 16 GB of VRAM, unlike the RX 7600 and RTX 4060 at $300 MSRP; however, it also rocks a TDP rating of 190W. Which is quite high considering the minimal generational performance uplift it comes with.
Personally, I would go for an RX 6700 XT because of its great price-to-performance ratio. The 7600 and 7600 XT aren’t just as good, but they are still somewhat of a better pick than the overpriced RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti.
Budget Segment Needs More Attention
On the flagship side of things, they can go as high as possible in terms of price and performance. However, we can’t replicate it regarding budget-friendly graphics cards. From what I have seen so far, both big manufacturers need to focus more on budget-tier graphics cards, especially the xx60 GPUs, as the current state is hurting a lot of budget PC gamers.
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