The Drop of GPU Prices

After months on end of artificial inflation, prices for popular graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia are starting to fall in price. While there are still those being sold for over the MSRP, 3DCenter reports that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series is currently selling for around 77% over MSRP vs the 87% over from last month. Similarly, the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series is also retailing for 67% over MSRP instead of 83%.

Nvidia and AMD cards have had their prices affected by numerous issues since their respective launch dates, namely due to the current chip shortage resulting in production being unable to match the demand as well as the competition from Ethereum crypto miners. Though the prices are still inflated, it’s a good sign that they’re slowly dropping back to their intended price.

Why are their prices slowly dropping though? There are a few theories, ranging from that people are just giving up, unwilling to pay scalper fees. Another is that it may have to do with the sudden plummet of cryptocurrency. There is no definitive answer for what may be causing the price drop, but it is reasonable to assume that, with the recent slump of crypto prices, GPUs are less valuable to miners now. Often a crypto miner’s goal is to sell large quantities of graphics cards when they can’t put them to work.

With that in mind, there aren’t any major indications that supply has caught back up to demand, as these cards remain to be incredibly hard to procure at anything save exorbitant prices. The Covid-19 pandemic causing production to slip, along with the rise of crypto mining in the last 18 months and increased market demand has created the ‘perfect storm’ we’ve been trapped in. Other than the market being flooded with affordable GPUs to discourage scalpers, there’s no easy fix. Even so, it’s still a good omen that, along with Nvidia and AMD’s previous signal, they expect supply to improve in the latter half of 2022.

In summary, best not get your hopes up. As GPU prices and availability have been fluctuating over the past year or so, it’s understandable that this will solve the situation overnight, but it at least does bode well that folks have a better chance at getting themselves the GPU they were looking for, and at a half-decent price.