Prices for graphics cards are finally dropping - back to normal in the summer?
[15:56 Sat,12.March 2022 by Thomas Richter]
As recently as in June 2021, we warned against false hopes of falling graphics card prices - but now (since the end of January) a trend reversal finally seems to be taking place: the prices for current top GPUs are falling for the first time. For a long time, the demand for high-performance GPUs dropped in 2021 due to cryptominer, but at the same time, the supply also decreased due to the consequences of the general chip crisis - so in the result, the prices remained far above the RRP, until now.
Those who were dependent on new GPU power had to bite the bullet and pay the high prices (and be happy that graphics cards have at least been available again for some time - albeit at high prices) or rely on powerful notebooks, whose mobile GPU variants aren&t as performant as the desktop versions, but at least affordable. For some professional users, Apple&s new M1 SoCs with their combined CPU/GPU power also offered an alternative (here&s our comparison test of the MacBook Pro M1 Pro vs M1 Max in editing performance with Resolve, Premiere and FCP).
Especially for compute-intensive work with high-resolution/RAW video, strong graphics cards like Nvidia&s 3000 series (3050/3060/3070/3080/3090) and AMD&s RX 6000 series are important, since many calculations are done in parallel using the graphics card&s CUDA cores (the highest demand, however, is of course due to the very large market of gamers who rely on strong GPUs for increasingly realistic rendering in higher resolutions and frame rates).
GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3070 Ti
The trend reversal
. According to a report from Tomshardware, GPU prices dropped by about 11% in February. We have now been able to determine an even stronger trend of falling prices based on a small (non-representative) sample of the prices of some graphics cards using the price trend in Geizhals: for example, a ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 3080 V2 OC (with 10 GB VRAM) cost around 1,600 euros in December and can now be had at prices between 1,250 and 1,200 euros, which corresponds to a drop of around 22%.
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 OC
We could see a similar thing with the price of a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 OC with 24 GB VRAM, whose price has dropped by 27% from a December 2021 level of just under 3,000 Euros to under 2,200 Euros and is thus only 25% above the MSRP of 1,749 Euros.
A relatively inexpensive GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Gaming OC 8G recently cost about 1,200 Euros and is on the market for just under 900 Euros, which is also 25% cheaper. The situation is similar for AMD&s top model, with the price of the ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 6800 XT OC dropping 20% from 1,500 Euros to 1,200 Euros within just 2 months.
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 OC price trend
I.e. the prices of the Nvidia graphics cards we examined are now only on average around As a reminder: At the absolute peak, strong GPUs were only available at 2-3 times their original price. We hope that the predictions that GPU prices will finally return to a normal level by the summer will come true.
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