This was my thoughts as well. Sub £700 is where I feel the 7800 XT 7900 XT should always have been priced. I was planning to get Starfield Premium at £65 from CD Keys and get a 7800 series as an upgrade for my son’s 6700XT running at 1440p. My thoughts are the 7800 will be £550 - £600 and by then the Starfield code might not be available on an AMD deal.
So a 7900 XT for £635 after the Starfield code savings had removed my psychological and principled reasoning not to buy. And will give quite a bit more performance than the 7800 I was waiting for.
I already have a 4080FE but only because I got it used for £900. It is an excellent GPU and I cannot fault it technically, other than the 16GB VRAM “will it won’t it last” mild worry. This 7900XT is not much slower in raster and still beats my old 3080 in RT. The 4080 is undoubtedly a better GPU than this, but no chance in hell is it worth almost £500 more than this GPU at current prices. RT on my 4080 still requires up scaling tech to get playable FPS at 4K. The difference between the 4080 and the 7900 XT in RT is to use balanced or performance instead of quality in FSR. And in raster it’s pretty much a wash with ~10% stock vs stock to the 4080.
Nvidia and AMD release pricing was a joke and still is apart from the odd deal like this one. So this is not AMD coming to their senses, this is Gibbo and OCUK doing PC gamers a solid. Had AMD released the 7900 XT at £700 or even £750 instead of £899, they would have massively increased their credibility and more importantly destroyed Nvidia’s in the process.
AMD got greedy.