Nvidia and AMD go head to head with changes to the RTX 2060 and RX 5600 XT

The graphics card wars seem to be heating up again with Nvidia slashing the price of the RTX 2060 and AMD seemingly boosting the performance of the RX 5600 XT.

In the last few days, Nvidia announced that its RTX 2060 card would now be priced at $299 (with prices reflected in other regions), and it was clear it was in retaliation to the Radeon RX 5600 XT because that's almost exactly what Nvidia said. In a statement, the firm referenced the launch of the Radeon RX 5600 XT, as well as its own GTX 1660 Super, before going on to explain the price cut. 

In response, it looks like AMD has gone with a performance boost for the Radeon RX 5600 XT rather than a price drop. According to Chinese news site, HKEPC, AMD has pushed out a BIOS update to manufacturers which has increased all-round performance.

The BIOS supposedly increases clock speeds of the RX 5600 XT to 1,615MHz for game clock speeds and 1,750MHz boost speed. That's quite the increase from the previous reports of 1,375MHz for game clock, and 1,560MHz for boost speed. As well as that, the card's TBP is up from 150W to 160W. 

Confirmation of such news is a little thin on the ground but the best source appears to be Sapphire's RX 5600 XT Pulse graphics card product page. Only very recently announced, its specifications have already been updated to now reference the new speeds without any indication that this is a souped up model in some way. 

Besides the improved clock speeds, Sapphire's product page also mentions a 15% increase in memory bandwidth with memory clock speeds increased from 12Gbps to 14Gbps. 

While that could just mean that Sapphire has somehow benefited from an improved RX 5600 XT, this seems unlikely. There's no new name for the card but more importantly, there's also been recent news of Asus's addition to the line up. Asus is going with the ROG Strix and TUF Gaming conventions for its two respective cards, and guess what? While it's announced they'll both be factory-overclocked, no clock speeds have been formally announced. 

It seems fairly likely that it's because clock speeds are still being worked on right now. 

If the new changes do go ahead, the RX 5600 XT will be far closer in performance to the RX 5700 while being cheaper. There's less memory to the RX 5600 XT, but other than that, there's not a lot in it. 

If you're planning on buying a new card at this kind of price range, your decision may get a bit more complicated than before.