AMD's and Nvidia's Latest Sub-$400 GPUs Fail To Push the Bar on 1440p Gaming

An anonymous reader shares a report: I'm disappointed. I've been waiting for AMD and Nvidia to offer up more affordable options for this generation of GPUs that could really push 1440p into the mainstream, but what I've been reviewing over the past week hasn't lived up to my expectations. Nvidia and AMD are both releasing new GPUs this week that are aimed at the budget PC gaming market. After seven years of 1080p dominating the mainstream, I was hopeful this generation would deliver 1440p value cards. Instead, Nvidia has started shipping a $399 RTX 4060 Ti today that the company is positioning as a 1080p card and not the 1440p sweet spot it really should be at this price point.

AMD is aggressively pricing its new Radeon RX 7600 at just $269, and it's definitely more suited to the 1080p resolution at that price point and performance. I just wish there were an option between the $300 to $400 marks that offered enough performance to push us firmly into the 1440p era. More than 60 percent of PC gamers are playing at 1080p, according to Valve's latest Steam data. That means GPU makers like AMD and Nvidia don't have to target 1440p with cards that sell in high volume because demand seems to be low. Part of that low demand could be because a monitor upgrade isn't a common purchase for PC gamers, or they'd have to pay more for a graphics card to even support 1440p. That's probably why both of these cards also still ship with just 8GB of VRAM because why ship it with more if you're only targeting 1080p? A lower resolution doesn't need as much VRAM for texture quality. I've been testing both cards at 1080p and 1440p to get a good idea of where they sit in the GPU market right now. It's fair to say that the RTX 4060 Ti essentially offers the same 1440p performance as an RTX 3070 at 1440p for $399. That's $100 less than the RTX 3070's $499 price point, which, in October 2020, I said offered a 1440p sweet spot for games during that period of time. It's now nearly three years on, and I'd certainly expect more performance here at 1440p. Why is yesterday's 1440p card suddenly a 1080p one for Nvidia?

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