Latest generation video cards, bad news: prices are constantly rising

“To the Moon“is the meme-phrase that is recited in the world of cryptocurrencies when a digital currency begins to rise, in the hope that its run will not stop and arrive, in fact, as far as the moon. Unfortunately, is a term that we could very well approach the video card market in the last year, since NVIDIA first and then AMD have introduced their latest solutions.

The demand for chips has put a strain on TSMC and Samsung’s production lines, leading to a shortage, where production simply does not keep up with demand. When an “asset” becomes scarce, prices go up and, of course, GPUs are no exception. The latest 3DCenter surveys as of October 31st on numerous shops scattered in Germany and Austria, a bit of a litmus test of the European market, we are told that the already high price lists per se continue to rise, a sign that production is not increasing in any way (in fact, the availability indicated by the dotted line is decreasing).

the Radeon RX 6000 based on RDNA 2 architecture (all but the last 6600 are counted in the graph) are twice as expensive as the price list, with + 101%, while as regards the GPUs GeForce RTX 3000 from NVIDIA, the price is 88% above the price list (again GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti are not part of the chart). The parable goes up, with one growth of 16-18 points since the last survey and a trend that takes us back by months.

The market is completely overwhelmed by the production situationIn fact, cards like the Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT can be found at higher prices than the flagship RX 6900 XT in some shops. On the NVIDIA front, the RTX 3070 Ti is sold at dizzying prices with peaks above 2000 euros, not to mention the 4000 euros of the RTX 3090.

Shortage will continue to hit hard for much of 2022: A few weeks ago AMD CEO Lisa Su feared an improvement in the second half of next year, but many believe that the situation will not be resolved before 2023. Furthermore, it should be noted that the move to Ethereum 2.0 (the consensus mechanism will move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, eliminating mining) is still a long way off.