AMD comes out fighting: Pick up a Radeon RX 590 for US$219.99; Vega 56 spotted again at US$279.99

Nvidia has been throwing some spanners in the works lately with the launches of the GeForce RTX 20-series and now the GTX 16-series. The green team has been aggressively targeting the GPU market at all price levels, with the brand-new GTX 1660 aimed at the budget level, which was traditionally AMD’s turf. To seemingly combat this state of affairs, at least one variant of the Radeon RX 590 has been made available for the same price as a GTX 1660.

The Sapphire Radeon NITRO+ RX 590 Special Edition card has been listed on Newegg for an attractive price of US$219.99 (as recently as March 15, although the price has fluctuated). If you’re lucky enough to be browsing the site when the RX 590 is advertised at that price, you may also find that AMD’s product comes with an enticing package of three free games, consisting of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, Resident Evil 2, and Devil May Cry 5.

If you’re extremely lucky, you might even catch one of the very limited time sales of the Vega 56. We recently reported on price cuts affecting this AMD card, and it looks like the US$279.99 mark has been hit once again. The Gigabyte Radeon RX Vega 56 card mentioned above was listed on Newegg for that price and also came with the limited AMD gift of a free games package (as of March 15). The GPU might be hovering around the US$399.99 mark in between sales; however, if you’re in the hunt for a Vega 56, it would be worthwhile to subscribe for price alerts, as you could save yourself a considerable amount of money.

The Radeon RX 590 has been compared against Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660; now it is possible to buy either card for the same price (with a bit of searching) it’s become even more important for gamers to make the right personal choice. The AMD card comes with 8 GB GDDR5, which is 2 GB more than Nvidia’s product. The RX 590’s memory bandwidth is also better, with a 256-bit interface providing 256 GB/s (GTX 1660: 192-bit/192 GB/s). But the new GTX 16-series card offers greater clock rates: base 1530 MHz vs. 1469 MHz; boost 1785 MHz vs. 1545 MHz.