AMD aims for budget end zone, runs price cut interference on Nvidia GTX 1050

As you’re probably aware, Nvidia is about to unleash its new wallet-friendly Pascal offerings, the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti, tomorrow at a very competitive price – but AMD has proved equally determined to be competitive, with the announcement of a pre-emptive price cut for both its Radeon RX 470 and RX 460 graphics cards.

These new prices actually went live yesterday over in the US, with the RX 470 getting cut to $169 (around £140, AU$220). As the RX 460, that now starts at $99 (around £80, AU$130) pushing it under the magic hundred bucks mark, and this represents a drop of ten bucks for both of these video cards.

So how does that compare to the recommended pricing of Nvidia’s new Pascal offerings? Both the GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti are expected to be available tomorrow priced at $109/£115 (around AU$140), and $139/£139 (around AU$180) respectively.

Budget wonder

So effectively, the RX 460 has nipped under the GTX 1050 as the budget wonder of the week. And if you want to see how their relative performance stacks up, our full review of the Nvidia card will be coming very shortly. Stay tuned, although note that we've already seen some preliminary benchmarks from Nvidia itself.

In the announcement sent out to the press, AMD was also keen to point out that the strengths of its Radeon cards also include the better affordability of compatible FreeSync monitors – the tech which helps to combat stuttering and tearing – compared to Nvidia’s more expensive G-Sync.

The Radeon RX 470 was launched with ‘brilliant Full HD gaming’ in mind and delivers up to 4.9 teraflops of power with 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, whereas the RX 460 is targeted at smooth eSports gaming in the likes of Overwatch with 2.2 teraflops delivered in the performance stakes (with 2GB or 4GB of video memory on-board).

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).