I found the one GPU deal worth buying on Cyber Monday

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By master

Color me surprised. I talked a big game about how you shouldn’t buy a GPU on Cyber Monday, and while I still hold true to that sentiment, I found one deal that’s actually solid — and it’s for a current-gen GPU. At Newegg, you can pick up the , which is the lowest I’ve ever seen this GPU go.

As you can read in my RX 7800 XT review, it’s still one of the best graphics cards you can buy. It handily beats Nvidia’s RTX 4070, and it can go toe-to-toe with the $600 RTX 4070 Super, at least in games without ray tracing. The card also comes with 16GB of VRAM, which is quite a large pool of video memory, considering the price.

Although this is one of the best GPU deals I’ve seen on Cyber Monday, context is still important. The RX 7800 XT launched at $500, but it has rarely sold for that price. Most models still sell for $550 or even $600, so the discount on this model is more significant than it looks at first glance. For context, ASRock’s Steel Legend version of the RX 7800 XT is currently listed for $630 — that’s the exact same GPU with a few extra bells and whistles, just almost $200 more expensive.

As for performance, the RX 7800 XT is a perfect 1440p GPU with enough power for 4K aspirations. Let me put that into context. As you can see in the chart above, the card averaged over 100 frames per second (fps) across my suite of test games at 1440p, beating the RTX 4070. At 1440p, you can expect triple-digit frame rates in most games at Ultra settings, short of the most demanding titles on PC like Silent Hill 2 and Cyberpunk 2077. 

At 4K, the card averaged nearly 70 fps, which is very impressive. In older titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Forza Horizon 5, the RX 7800 XT is capable of above 60 fps without upscaling at 4K, though it’ll struggle to hit that mark in titles like Black Myth: Wukong. Thankfully, like all of AMD’s GPUs, you can use FSR 3 for both upscaling and frame generation in games where the feature is available.

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At this higher resolution, the 16GB of VRAM helps a lot, too. Nvidia’s RTX 4070 comes with 12GB, but the $400 RTX 4060 Ti only comes with 8GB. That’s a massive limitation in games like Resident Evil 4 and The Last of Us Part One that the RX 7800 XT doesn’t run into.

The RX 7800 XT was already a good buy when it launched, based purely on its raw performance. However, AMD has made the GPU significantly more attractive over the past few months. Like all current-gen AMD cards, the RX 7800 XT supports AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames 2 (AFMF 2), which offers frame generation to just about any game.

This is a driver-level feature, so it isn’t available to Nvidia or Intel GPUs. AFMF 2 essentially runs on top of your game and offers frame generation in titles that normally don’t support the feature — that includes games like Elden Ring, which otherwise have a hard frame rate cap. I loved AFMF 2 when I tested it, mostly due to how stable it is.

The first version of AFMF was basically unusable. It would cut out constantly during gameplay, leading to an experience that, despite what the frame rate counter said, felt terrible to play with micro-stutters and inconsistent frame pacing. AFMF 2 doesn’t have those problems. It uses a machine learning-based algorithm and provides image quality on par with tools like Lossless Scaling.

Although GPU deals generally aren’t great on Cyber Monday, this RX 7800 XT deal is shockingly good. You’re saving $50 over list price and above $100 if you compare the pricing to what the RX 7800 XT has been selling for. For some context, at Newegg as well, but the sale is simply selling the card at list price. With those kinds of options, the RX 7800 XT is actually a good deal.

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