NVIDIA GeForce And AMD Radeon Graphics Card Prices Drop Again Approaching MSRP
For a frustrating minute (figuratively), it seemed like graphics cards would never be in stock at anywhere close to MSRP levels ever again. It's been depressing, to say the least. But over the course of 2022, prices have been steadily falling and are now at the point where the average cost for both GeForce RTX 30 and Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card models are nearly back to launch pricing.
Looking at the glass as being half empty, the response is, 'Gee, how wonderful, prices finally normalize when new generation GPUs are on the horizon'. And that's a fair evaluation. But if looking at the glass half full, it's been a long wait to get back to this point, and it means you can upgrade your GPU without feeling like you've been punched in the gut.
That's the case if you live in Austria or Germany, anywhere. The folks at 3DCenter.org have been tracking graphics card prices at nine popular vendors in those regions, and there's a look at the updated graph...
Source: 3DCenter.org
At their peak, retailer pricing for GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards were selling for a whopping 218 percent above MSRP, while Radeon RX 6000 series cards commanded a 116 percent premium. That was the situation in this same month a year ago. And now?
Prices have been declining since the start of the year when GeForce cards were selling for 85 percent over MSRP and Radeon cards were priced 78 percent above. As of now, however, pricing premiums on GeForce and Radeon cards have fallen to 6 percent and 2 percent above MSRP, respectively, according to the latest GPU price tracking data.
There are caveats. The recently released GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and Radeon RX 65x0 series distort the average selling price. However, it's still a much better situation than it was. When looking at what the site considers just the "core" GPUs (Radeon RX 6800 XT, 6800, and 6700 XT, and GeForce RTX 3080 10GB, 3070, and 3060 Ti), the average markup over MSRP is 17 percent.
What about in the US? It's a mix. For example, you can find a Zotac GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Amp Edition for $1,899.99 at Amazon, which is actually $100 below the MSRP for a Founders Edition (reference) model. And over at AMD's webstore, the Radeon RX 6950 XT, 6750 XT, and 6900 XT are all in stock at MSRP.
That's not the situation across the board, though. The lowest price GeForce RTX 3070 we can find is a Gigabyte Eagle OC model for $599.99 at Newegg, which is $100 above NVIDIA's reference pricing. That kind of markup applies to several different SKUs. Bottom line though, is as a whole the market certainly looks better now than it has in the past 12+ months.
