I'm sad there are no Intel Arc graphics card deals — so get this instead while you can

Deals events like Amazon Prime Day are one of the best times of the year to get a new graphics card for your gaming PC. This year I was hoping to be able to gush over some excellent deals on Intel Arc cards, because as I've written before, I'm fully behind the new underdog in the market. I use an ASRock A770 in my own gaming PC. 

Enter the sad face then when there aren't any. One of the big deals around Intel Arc is price, and I was hoping Prime Day would be a good chance to capture a few more minds by severely undercutting the competition with some awesome graphics card deals. That hasn't happened, so it got me to looking for an alternative. And I came up with this.  

PowerColor Fighter Radeon RX 6700 XT: was $370 now $299 at Amazon

The RX 6700 XT outperforms Intel and NVIDIA's equivalents in some areas at its regular price point, but this Prime Day special is definitely the budget graphics card to get. It's not too flashy to look at but has 12GB of VRAM and strong raw performance up to 1440p. 

✅Best features: Strong 1440p performance, ray tracing support, and better value than equivalent NVIDIA graphics cards.

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Why an AMD card over an NVIDIA RTX 3060 or 3060 Ti? For starters, it's a better performer than an RTX 3060 and with this discount applied, costs about the same as the RTX 3060 deals you can get right now. Which also makes it cheaper than an RTX 3060 Ti. 

We've got a full comparison of the RTX 3060 Ti and the RX 6700 XT you can check out, but the tl;dr is that unless you really insist on DLSS and the best ray tracing performance, AMD is the way to go. FSR is an alternative upscaling tool to DLSS that's fully supported on an AMD graphics cards and as it's open source, very widely used. 

But I'd also lean towards AMD over NVIDIA, especially in this case, for other reasons. I'm not going to go crazy and trash team green, because the RTX family is (mostly) extremely impressive. But NVIDIA holds way too much power over the market and prices are going up and up. And NVIDIA seems to think paying a ton for a graphics card is absolutely fine. 

I beg to differ, though, which is one big reason I'm behind Intel. Even AMD's graphics cards are getting pricier, while for Intel, resetting the market and providing good performance at realistic prices is a key focus. But in the absence of Intel deals, this RX 6700 XT is definitely the one that catches my eye.