AMD and Nvidia's GPU holiday launch could mean huge savings for gamers

There have been talks today about AMD’s upcoming RDNA 3 GPU release happening just before Christmas, which would be great for a variety of reasons.

According to Moore’s Law is Dead and reported by PCGamesN, it seems that just like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090, AMD is gearing up to launch their high-end Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards powered by the RDNA 3 sometime either in November or December.

The report also states that both AMD and Nvidia will only be releasing their top-tier cards this year, with later models rumored to release in 2023. There's a good chance that this will be the case, since the global silicon shortage is still taking its bite out of technology supply lines around the world. 

If you only have enough resources to launch one card this year, why not make it the best one you've got?

Analysis: The more they fight, the more gamers will benefit

At first, this might seem like dire straits for budget gamers. But consider this: if Team Green and Team Red are launching their very best during the holiday season, this means we’re gearing up for some serious competition between the GPU giants. We could be looking at some serious reductions in pricing, especially on current-gen hardware like the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT, which is the best possible outcome.

With both the AMD RDNA 3 and Nvidia Lovelace cards, we could see prices anywhere from $500 to over $2,000, depending on a number of factors including a price hike from chip manufacturer TSMC. But AMD and Nividia are trying to win over the market, and that market has been suffering for over two years now from poor stock availability, rising retail prices, and Ebay and StockX scalpers. 

Unless the two card makers want to break the spirits of even more gamers, then those prices need to stay as close to the starting $500 price point as possible, and there is going to be a lot of pressure to keep the prices of the cards at least in line with what they were with this current generation.

This isn’t some half-baked theory either. According to well-known Twitter leaker kopite7kimi, Nvidia had long since abandoned work on the original Lovelace GPU and instead will be using a brand new AD102 GPU, one that’s basically a whole new architecture rather than the originally planned refresh. Most likely the cause of the change in what’s powering the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards is seeing the rumored performance in its competition’s own Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs.  

Nvidia is feeling the pressure from AMD in ways it hasn't in many years, so if Nvidia could reportedly overhaul its developmental roadmap based on what AMD was cooling up, then some healthy competition leading to lower prices isn't an idle hope.

If we're lucky, these release date rumors are true and we can see some proper competitive pricing. At the very least, we might be able to avoid the overinflated prices of the last-generation.