The crazy thing is that's not even really true. RDNA2 competed extremely well with Ampere. In Raster it was generally slightly better than its direct competition, and excluding the insanity of Covid and supply shortages, it was always cheaper as well.
I paid $360 for my 6700xt in Dec 2022. Now 6700xt's are routinely like $300 on sale. The equivalent from Nvidia is... what? The 4060ti is slightly faster but only has 8gb of VRAM, and launched at $400 fucking dollars. The 4060ti 16gb is the same performance with more VRAM and launched at $500 fucking dollars.
At this point what's propping up Nvidia is unfathomable levels of mind share. The product stack doesn't actually deserve to sell anywhere near as well as it is currently.
It's certainly not unheard of in the tech world for this to happen. Look at Apple releasing a fucking $1600 MBP with 8gb of RAM, and then trying to gaslight their customers into believing it's better than it is, like they aren't being ripped off. Shit's absurd, but the average consumer is a pre-programmed midwit that relies almost entirely on brand loyalty to make their purchasing decisions.
And while I'm not super impressed with RDNA3 at launch, it's significantly better as the prices slowly creep down. I kind of figure the 7800xt will slowly creep down towards $450 being a normal price, and the 7700xt will probably creep under $400.
The 7600, when priced below 250, especially in the low 200's, like $220-230, is fantastic value as well.
Even at the high end, the 7900xt at $700-750 is a solid buy, and the 7900xt at $900 or less is very good as well.
Lovelace is fantastic from a technical perspective, but Nvidia outdid their own previous records for greed when it comes to the product stack and the pricing.
Pretty sweet. Looking forward to 2024 though, knowing what's coming from Strix point and other similar apu products. I think handheld devices 12-24 months from now are going to be absurdly powerful by comparison, especially at resolutions like 1280x800.