There's been a bit of a whirlwind in the graphics card world this week, as Nvidia attempted to take the thunder out of AMD's Radeon RX 5600 XT announcement by dropping the price of its GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition to $299 on Thursday. As its launch (next Tuesday) approaches, rumors suggest that AMD is pushing a VBIOS update to its board partners, allowing for significantly faster gaming clocks and boost clocks.

We'll touch on these rumors in a moment, but let's discuss the 5600 XT's specifications: the 5600 XT is the latest member of AMD's Navi-based graphics card lineup and is a 36-compute unit, 2,304 stream processors, 192 bit bus, and 6GB of GDDR6 memory (12Gbps) that pushes data through a 192-bit bus.

AMD has set the stock gaming frequency at 1,375 MHz and the stock boost frequency at 1,560 MHz. With these specs, AMD claims that the RX 5600 XT is faster than Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. [It is worth noting, however, that Nvidia has reduced the RTX 2060's price from $349 to $299, only $20 more than the 5600 XT.

Now, back to the rumor mill: according to HKEPC, AMD will raise the game clock to 1,615 MHz and the boost clock to 1,750 MHz, +240 MHz and +190 MHz respectively. If this rumor is true, this difference is not insignificant.

AMD is still showing the slower clock on their website, but AMD's close partner Sapphire has, interestingly, updated the specifications on their Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT product page with the rumored clock (hats off to Videocardz (hats off to Videocardz for discovering this). It is also worth noting that Sapphire has listed the memory clock as 14 Gbps instead of 12 Gbps.

The RTX 2060 price cut is not limited to the RX 5600 XT; it is likely only the Founders Edition and EVGA's new KO model, but other manufacturers are sure to follow suit. That leaves the 1660 Ti in an odd place, and prices on that card are starting to drop. For example, this Gigabyte GTX 1660 Ti is $239 after rebate. This could spill over to other cards such as the 1660 Super and the regular 1660; prices on AMD cards may fluctuate as well.

We will have to wait a few days to see what is happening. However, this would not be the first time AMD and Nvidia have done this dance. As we wrote last week (regarding EVGA's GeForce RTX 2060 KO Edition card), AMD has claimed that by announcing the Radeon RX 5700 series at a higher price than it actually plans to sell, AMD has lured Nvidia into launching a GeForce RTX Super card After Nvidia launched the Super models, AMD reduced the price of the 5700 XT from $499 to $399 and the 5700 from $379 to $349 in the final hours before launch.