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- Analysts believe Nvidia graphics cards below $500 are not worth buying.
- The cheaper offerings are held back by limited VRAM and underwhelming performance.
- AMD has much better options for those looking to pick up a graphics card for less than $400.
Nvidia’s latest graphics cards have not been the most appealing. Whether it be due to pricing, less-than-ideal amounts of VRAM, or poor gen-on-gen gains, the RTX 40 GPUs have, more often than not, disappointed gamers.
Things are even worse when looking at the budget and mid-range offerings from Nvidia, with nothing particularly appealing. In fact, analysts recently argued that no Nviida graphics cards below the $400 price point provide good value.
Why it matters: Most PC gamers shop for graphics cards within the $300-400 range to strike a balance between price and performance.
Digital Foundry was recently asked whether any of Nvidia’s graphics cards from below the $400 price range offered good value. The analysts were quick to say ‘no’ and discuss why gamers might not want to consider these options.
My answer to that is basically no.
-Digital Foundry
For starters, cards like the GeForce RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti are handicapped by just 8GB of VRAM. The former also offers a marginal upgrade over its predecessor, barely making it capable of running the latest titles at 1080p.
A GeForce RTX 4060 is said to perform similarly to the base PS5, making it equivalent to console performance from 2020. This alone makes it a poor purchase today, especially with the Blackwell gaming lineup on the horizon.
As per the analysts, Nvidia’s feature set, while impressive, is of little use when the hardware in such graphics cards is as weak as it is.
They believe that the GeForce RTX 4070 is the bare minimum gamers should consider to make the most of features like DLSS, frame generation, and ray tracing, but even this graphics card could have had a bit more VRAM.
On the other hand, AMD GPUs are much more suited to budget-oriented consumers since they go on discounts frequently. The likes of the Radeon RX 7700 XT offer quite a bit more than Nvidia’s offerings for around the $400 price point.
Here’s hoping that Nvidia will bring better GPUs to the table with the Blackwell lineup. The GeForce RTX 5060 is rumored to be among the cards arriving before most others in the series, so it will be interesting to see how this mid-range option turns out.
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[News Reporter]
Avinash is currently pursuing a Business degree in Australia. For more than three years, he has been working as a gaming journalist, utilizing his writing skills and love for gaming to report on the latest updates in the industry. Avinash loves to play action games like Devil May Cry and has also been mentioned on highly regarded websites, such as IGN, GamesRadar, GameRant, Dualshockers, CBR, and Gamespot.
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