AMD undercuts Nvidia's 4060 launch with a $269 GPU

After more than two years of soaring GPU prices – fueled by demand from cryptominers and then made worse by the semiconductor shortage – things are finally heading in the other direction on price.

AMD has released its mid-tier RX 7600 GPU at a recommended retail price of $269. That's $50 less than its predecessor, and $30 cheaper than Nvidia's RTX 4060, announced only last week. But as always, we'll have to wait and see what stores actually charge when the cards hit shelves on Thursday.

Just like the older RX 6600, AMD's latest card is aimed at 1080p gamers. That isn't all that surprising, considering that games-mart Steam's April hardware survey found that nearly two thirds of gamers are still rocking 1080p monitors.

The RX 7600 uses the chip shop's latest RDNA 3 graphics architecture and is the least expensive card in AMD's lineup with support for the uber-efficient AV1 video codec.

The device boasts 32 compute units, 32 ray accelerators, 64 render output units, 2,048 stream processors, and 128 texture units. The card clocks up to 2.66GHz, and boasts 8GB of GDDR6, and a rather tame 165W TDP.

AMD's memory choices could end up prematurely dating the card. vRAM requirements for premium blockbuster games have risen in recent years, with the likes of Jedi Survivor requiring a minimum 8GB.

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AMD claims this card delivers respectable performance improvements, though we recommend taking the stats with a healthy grain of salt – more on that in a minute. Compared to its predecessor, the chip design outfit says customers can expect roughly 29 percent higher performance.

Where AMD starts to fudge the numbers is when comparing the card against Nvidia's 3060.

AMD claims its RX 7600 leads Nvidia's 8GB 3060 by 34 percent – but as you may recall, the 3060 launched with 12GB of vRAM, not 8GB. The comparison AMD is really making here is to a cut down version of the 3060 that launched late last year, with a much narrower 128-bit memory bus and, by extension, poorer performance.

From what we can tell, this is probably down to the RX 7600 using a 128-bit memory bus. And while that might make it a fairer comparison, it's not the 3060 most folks will recognize – so it's hard not to see this as a ploy by AMD to make the RX 7600 appear more performant than it really is.

It appears AMD has also timed the RX 7600's launch to steal thunder from Nvidia's $399 8GB 4060 TI, which hit store shelves Wednesday. ®