You may have heard about the shortage of semiconductors, and particularly PC graphic cards have almost become hard to find. But the fact is that the circumstances are seemingly worse than they were expected. Some of the graphics cards are now available for a price that is triple their MSRP. It’s hitting the pro-gamers really hard. If you want to buy a graphics card now, you would have to pay more than double or even triple the price.
The AMD Radeon RX 6800 comes with a $579 price tag, whereas, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 is priced at $499 but their street prices had surged to $841and $819 respectively in December last year. For a pair of these graphics cards, you would have to pay $1,660.
Both GPUs that you can see now worth $2,570 – but that’s not the selling price mind you. It is actually sold at $1,200 on average in an open market and people actually are paying the price for a single graphic card – and that’s literally absurd.
To know how much these graphics cards are worth, on average, we ran PS5 and Xbox Series X on AMD and Nvidia’s new graphics card respectively, and spent a significant number of hours to validate the results.
The prices began to skyrocket in February when RTX 3080 MSRP shot up to $ 2,400, and RTX 3070 was available for $1,200.
The prices began to drop significantly at the same time last week when Nvidia launched the affordable GPU RTX 3000 series including RTX 3060 that comes with a $329 price tag.
That absurdity continues to affect the prices of AMD’s Radeon graphics cards as well. Scalpers are now selling these GPUs in about double the actual cost. As far as AMD GPUs are concerned, their prices on eBay prices have gone up, thereby forcing the vendors like EVGA, Asus, and MSI to raise the GPU prices. All thanks to the 25% Trump-era increase in tariff on products imported from China.
It is interesting to note how these GPUs have sold on online stores. The demand and supply equation is heavily skewed. During an interval of seven-days, eBay managed to sell 5,254 PS5 consoles that they did not promote. The PS5 scalping is turning into much less worthwhile, eBay’s being flooded, and issues are inclining.
It is a fact that the year 2021 has started on a bad note for PC manufacturers. You should not be surprised to see further price hikes.
AMD’s promise of making a greater number of GPUs available in the market seems to be a long shot. And Nvidia had warned beforehand that it would take till April-end to address the issues regarding the unprecedented price hikes.
It’s not helpful at all to know that the selling prices of graphics cards are going north, but the question remains when will AMD and Nvidia get to produce a greater number of new graphics cards to handle this pent-up demand.
In the meantime, PC manufacturers are facing lack of supplies. The latest AMD and Nvidia graphics cards are currently out of stock, and this issue may persist for a few more months.