AMD Radeon And NVIDIA GeForce GPU Prices Are Reportedly Rising Again
You may have struck out trying to buy a graphics card from a first-party seller, but on the bright side, that also means you did not pay way over MSRP for one, either. Yeah, it is not much of a silver lining. The supply of graphics cards continues to fall way short of demand, and price tracking data shows that they are still commanding increasingly higher prices.
It has been an interesting summer in that regard. As we headed into the summer months, prices had ballooned to all-time highs on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series and AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, both based on each one's latest generation GPU architecture (Ampere and RDNA 2, respectively).
As summer marched along, GPU prices trended downward, which at the time could be seen as an encouraging sign. Pricing on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series in particular went into free fall mode, going from selling for as much as 200 percent over MSRP in May to 'only' 50 percent over MSRP at the beginning of August. But now all current generation GPUs are back on the rise, unfortunately.
Click to Enlarge (Source: 3DCenter)
The folks at 3DCenter have been tracking GPUs prices at German retailers, and as you can see in the updated chart above, graphics card prices have been steadily rising in the past several weeks.
Note that the 100 percent level is where the MSRPs sit at, so looking at cards comprising the GeForce RTX 30 series, they are now selling for 70 percent above MSRP. Cards comprising AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series, meanwhile, are seeing a similar mark up—74 percent over MSRP, according to the chart.
The top models in each lineup were always going to command a premium, and now cost even more, in terms of street pricing. But where the impact might be felt the hardest is in the lower end of the spectrum. The cheapest entry into Ampere on the desktop is the GeForce RTX 3060, a card that is supposed to command $329 in the US. And for RDNA 2, the baseline price for the Radeon RX 6600 XT is $379.
Click to Enlarge
Good luck finding those cards at anywhere near MSRP. I did a quick check on eBay of the most recently ended auctions that found buyers (cards that sold, in other words, rather than auctions that just ended without a buyer), and the GeForce RTX 3060 has typically commanded over $600, and sometimes over $700. The Radeon RX 6600 XT, meanwhile, is selling for around $630 to $650 for the most part.
There are levels to explain why. The deepest one is simply not enough silicon to meet demand, a consequence of a global shortage of semiconductors, the lingering pandemic, new GPU launches, and of course cryptocurrency mining.
Here's hoping for better times ahead. To that end, AMD CFO Devinder Kumar recently offered up some optimism, saying "as we get to 2022 and look at all partners across the board, the supply situation continues to get better." But we have also heard multiple warnings (from TSMC, Intel, and IBM) that the supply shortage could linger into 2023. So, we'll just have to wait and see how the market unfolds.
