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[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

It's $100 AUD more expensive right now, but it's MSRP is actually down from the RX 6600 ($329 for the RX 6600, $269 for the 7600) and more in line of the RX 5600 (which was OEM-only, but the price of the 7600 lies between the 5600X and 5500). The performance uptick of ~30% over the RX 6600 is also rather decent.

In other words, it's price or performance isn't the problem, but rather it's value proposition, since the RX 6000 series GPUs dropped so much that it makes the 7600 look expensive by comparison. And since there hasn't been a successor to the 6600XT yet, the 7600 must pull double duty and replace the 6600XT/6650XT so far, against whose it's practically no upgrade at all, making it's value look even worse.

12GB would have been nice, no question. But since the memory bus is already rather narrow, 96 bit could have been too low even with more infinity cache and extra fast memory chips - though I think the problem would then have been that the price would then have needed to increase quite a bit (more memory, more cache, faster VRAM chips), destroying it's value proposition even more than it does right now just to get to 12GB.

Instead, if AMD would have opted for a 160 bit bus, they could have gone with 10GB and could have used slightly slower VRAM chips, balancing the price of the thicker board and extra memory with somewhat cheaper memory. 10GB might not look like a big increase, but it's definitely better and less limiting than just 8GB and considering the performance, it should also be enough for the card.

As for the driver control panel... yeah, NVidia's always makes me think I'm back on Win95, I wonder why they still stick to this carbon-dated design.

But we need to compare it to products and their pricing on the market as they stand currently.
MSRP hasn't really held much meaning over the last several years.

96bit would have been fine if they used faster memory, bandwidth wouldn't have moved much from where it is now if they used a 96bit bus but 22,400MT/s DRAM.

But those memory chips are more expensive than the 18.000 DRAMs, and you would have needed more of them for 12GB, so there's a substantial risk it would have made the card more expensive. I don't think AMD would have sold such a card for under $300 MSRP to compensate for the extra costs, which considering it's performance would have hurt it's value at least just as much than going with just 8GB.

The problem is not directly MSRP, it's more that this time last gen GPUs have had much bigger stocks due to the crypto craze. Normally by this time after the launch of a GPU generation all the old stock has long been sold, negating the problem at hand, but not this time.