New graphics cards suitable for gaming in the current year, priced below €100, are sadly a thing of the past.
Fortunately, there are some choices in the €115 range.
If we consider these to be successors to €100 cards such as the GTX 1050 and RX 460/560, we could attribute this €15 price hike to inflation rather than pure greed.
However, given the differences in VRAM and performance, I must say I hoped for better. 2016 was almost nine years ago.
Back then, the optional 4GB VRAM was a reasonably generous amount for both GTX 1050 and RX 460/560. But we could use a little bit more after almost a decade.
Still, given the competition (or lack thereof), Radeon RX 6500 XT is a decent pickup for €115.
In most games, it’s almost as fast as the desktop RTX 3050 6GB, and it outperforms the laptop RTX 3050 Ti 4GB.
On low enough settings, it can still handle every modern game.
However, if texture quality is more important than raw performance, Intel Arc A380 6GB (also available for €115) provides enough VRAM for higher quality textures.
It’s still more powerful than the mobile RTX 3050 Ti 4GB and natively supports Intel XeSS upscaling, which (on Intel cards, where there is negligible performance hit) is almost as good as Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling.
Nvidia doesn’t offer anything at this price range; even the weakest GTX 1630 costs almost €200. It doesn’t make any sense as it doesn’t have any of the features that justify Nvidia’s pricing on RTX cards—there is no DLSS, no Ray Tracing, no RTX Voice, no AV1 encoder, no Nvidia Broadcast, etc.
So is that it? Are the only choices for €115 the RX 6500 XT and Intel Arc A380? When shopping in Europe, yes. But when shopping in China…
Let me (re)-introduce you to the Radeon RX 5600 XT 6GB, often found on AliExpress for $120 (around €115).
It’s significantly more powerful than the RX 6500 XT (which isn’t difficult to achieve; even the RX 5500 XT was more powerful).
It easily outperforms the desktop variant of the RTX 3050 6GB and comes surprisingly close to the desktop variant of the RTX 3060 8GB.
It also outperforms the mobile variants of the 3050 and 3060.
Architecturally, it’s not far from ‘modern’ cards.
Technically, it’s only one generation behind the RX 6000 series, despite being released almost half a decade ago in January 2020.
It supports FSR 2 upscaling and FSR 3 frame generation.
It supports DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1 (required in Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum and possibly more games in the future).
It meets the minimum hardware requirements for Alan Wake 2.
There are no issues with memory bandwidth (GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus).
No issues with Vulkan (the latest 1.4 version released last week is supported).
No issues with drivers (still supported, with no potential end of support date given yet).
The catch is that you would have to buy it on AliExpress, and it’s not always available. However, when using AliExpress Choice , the experience isn’t much different from buying from local stores. Shipping is reasonably fast (around one week), free returns are available with no questions asked, and there is buyer protection/warranty (up to six months when using PayPal). I’m not saying it’s exactly the same as buying from Media Markt or other brick-and-mortar stores. But if you’re willing to take a relatively small risk, you could get a lot more value for your money. Basically, you can move one tier up on the performance ladder—from an RTX 3050 6GB competitor to an RTX 3060 8GB competitor.