GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition Gets A Chunky Price Cut With A Caveat
The GeForce RTX 4090 could be difficult to find at retail when it came out, but now, you can walk into any Micro Center in the US and they'll have at least a couple on the shelf. Likewise, they're readily available on Amazon and other retailers. If you've got the scratch, there's no faster GPU anywhere, especially in ray-traced and path-traced games like Cyberpunk 2077.
Over in Europe, NVIDIA's been dropping the price of the GeForce RTX 4090 almost every month this year. The cards started out at €1,949 when they released in October of last year, but fell to €1,859 in February, dropped again to €1,819 in March, and now have dropped as low as €1,769.
These prices are for the Founders' Edition card, and you can usually find partner cards cheaper than the FE model, but drops in the price of NVIDIA's board typically mean that NVIDIA has lowered pricing guidelines, and that means that folks in Europe might start seeing GeForce RTX 4090 cards listed for less and less money.
If those prices sound extravagant to you—after all, they're even higher than the US Dollar price—remember that European prices generally include the required taxes, and those taxes can be quite high compared to American taxes. Where most people in the US will pay 10% or less "sales tax," the equivalent taxes in Europe are frequently 19% or even higher, like the 25% paid in Norway.
Judging by the Steam hardware survey, adoption of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4000 family cards has been pretty slow, and the high costs are surely to blame for that. Hopefully, these price cuts find their way not only to the US, but also to the lower-tier cards in the Ada Lovelace family, particularly the GeForce RTX 4080.
