AMD Radeon RX 590 and 580 graphics cards to get a big price cut?

The latest word from the graphics grapevine is that AMD intends to cut the asking price of its Radeon RX 590 and RX 580 graphics cards by a considerable amount to be competitive with Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.

The rumor suggests that AMD will cut the recommended asking price of the RX 590 down to $229 at some point in possibly the next few weeks, with the RX 580 being dropped to $199 to make room for that (we’re talking about the 8GB versions of both GPUs here). While that’s the US price, if it happens, we’d expect a global price cut in line with that across all territories.

The source of this speculation – an Italian tech site – isn’t the most robust we’ve ever seen, so we have to bear that firmly in mind. But on the other hand, such a move would make sense for AMD for several reasons.

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If you recall, the launch price of the RX 590 was $279 (it was around £260 in the UK), with the RX 580 pitched at $229 (around £220 in the UK). And now that Nvidia has launched its new GTX Turing GPU, that doesn’t look so competitive.

The GTX 1660 Ti starts at $279 (£259) just like the RX 590, and comfortably outruns AMD’s graphics card in most benchmarks – and indeed Nvidia’s GPU is more in line with the Vega 56 in some 1080p benchmarks (like Shadow of the Tomb Raider).

Getting savvy before Navi?

So it seems like a bit of a no-brainer for AMD to try and make the RX 590 a more tempting proposition, particularly when we consider the second factor – that new Navi graphics cards are potentially on the near horizon.

These Navi GPUs could be launching as soon as July, and so AMD may want to shift remaining stock of its Polaris-based cards like the RX 590/580 before the company gets into a new production cycle.

A final consideration to support this speculation is that we’ve already seen some manufacturers and/or retailers offering price cuts on AMD’s Vega 56 – because as we mentioned, the 1660 Ti is roughly in the same ballpark as this pricier GPU with some game benchmarks (only some, mind you).

You may have seen that last week, several online retailers gave some Vega 56 cards major price cuts, such as Overclockers slashing MSI’s Vega 56 down to £249 in the UK (that GPU is now out of stock at that outlet, as well as another UK retailer which hit a just-under-£250 price tag for that particular video card).

Bearing all that in mind, it would be no surprise to see the RX 590 and 580 get a substantial price cut in the near future, but as ever, we’ll just have to wait and see if the speculation pans out.