What just happened? AMD might be sorely lagging behind Nvidia when it comes to graphics card popularity, but team red has just published a chart claiming to illustrate one area where it has Jensen & Co. beat: performance per dollar.
Frank Azor, AMD's Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions and Marketing, tweeted that as a gamer, he is grateful to see renewed competition in the high-end graphics card segment. He also posted a chart claiming to show how AMD's Radeon lineup fares against Nvidia's similarly priced equivalents when it comes to performance per dollar (FPS/$) and frames per watt (FPS/Watt).
According to the chart, AMD's RDNA 2 line offers up to 89% more performance per dollar than Nvidia's cards---that figure compares the RX 6400 to the GTX 1050 Ti. AMD's flagship RX 6950 XT, meanwhile, gives 80% more FPS/$ than the RTX 3090 and 22% more FPS/Watt thanks to the Radeon card's 15W lower power requirement.
When it comes to power consumption, AMD has all but the RX 6750 XT (vs. the RTX 3070) and RX 6500 XT (vs. GTX 1650) ahead of Nvidia in terms of performance per watt.
We shouldn't take too much heed from an AMD marketing chart, of course. Firstly, there's no mention of what games were used for the FPS tests, but you can guarantee they would have been cherry picked to favor AMD hardware. Take a look at our own comparison of the RTX 3060 Ti and RX 6700 XT across 50 games at 1440p:
Then there are the prices. The chart says it uses Newegg prices as of May 10, but as we know, cards are getting closer to MSRP every day. AMD has the RTX 3070 Ti down as $750, for example, but there is a $699 Asus TUF 3070 Ti on Newegg right now.
You might also notice the RX 6800 XT is down as having a 280W TBP, yet the official specs say it is 300 Watts.
For an unbiased comparison of similar cards, check out our own versus series, including the RTX 3060 vs. RX 6600 XT, RTX 3060 Ti vs. RX 6700 XT, and the RTX 3080 vs. RX 6800 XT.