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Amazon Prime Day graphics card deals are no longer a hopeless dream. They’re a very real reality. It’s a sign of the decline of the ethereum-based GPU mining boom, and the subsiding of the graphics card shortage and supply chain nightmare that has been the backdrop of PC gaming for the last couple of years.
On the other hand, it also shows that we’re fast approaching a new generation of computer hardware; most notably: graphics cards. It means retailers are keen to ship stock of current-gen GPUs since they won’t be able to charge as much once new hardware rolls off the line.
All this leaves us in a little bit of a quandary—while there are some big discounts on graphics cards right now, and other Prime Day PC gaming deals (opens in new tab), they’re discounts on overinflated prices. We’re also seeing the biggest savings on the higher-end GPUs, such as the GeForce RTX 3090 and Radeon RX 6900 XT, which will be superseded first at the dawn of the new silicon age.
You can easily find $200 savings on an RTX 3090, maybe even taking it under MSRP, but since the upcoming ~$600 RTX 4070 is likely to outperform it, that’s not a purchase we’d necessarily recommend. Not unless you really need a new high-end graphics card, right now.
Still, the start of a new generation supply is always tight, so grabbing a next-gen GPU at launch could be tough. There’s almost always new tech just around the corner, though, so sometimes you just have to say ‘screw it!’ and hit the buy button.
If you can find a good price on anything from an RTX 3070 or under, then you’re doing well, because the mid-range of either AMD or Nvidia’s new pile of graphics cards won’t see the light of day until well into next year.
Where are the best Prime Day graphics card deals?
Amazon Prime Day graphics card deals
Amazon Prime Day UK Graphics Card deals
GPU benchmarks
Every new GPU generation offers new features and possibilities. But rasterized rendering is still the most important metric for general gaming performance across the PC gaming world. Sure, Nvidia GPUs might well be better at the ray tracing benchmarks they more or less instigated, but when it comes to standard gaming performance AMD’s latest line up can certainly keep pace.
It’s also worth noting that the previous generation of graphics cards do still have something to offer, with something like the GTX 1650 Super able to outpace a more modern RTX 3050 in most benchmarks.
We’re not saying you should buy an older card in 2022, but it’s worth knowing where your current GPU stacks up, or just knowing the lie of the land. But there is also the fact there will be gaming rigs on sale with older graphics cards over the next few days, and if they’re cheap enough they may still be worth a punt as a cheap entry into PC gaming.
We’ve benchmarked all the latest GPUs of this generation, and have tracked their performance against the previous generation in terms of 3DMark Time Spy Extreme scores. Where we don’t have the referential numbers for an older card we have used the average index score from the UL database. These figures track alongside an aggregated 1440p frame rate score from across our suite of benchmarks.
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