Middle finger to all gamers: graphics cards are still too expensive

Nvidia loudly complains about overly full graphics card warehouses, which one would like to tackle with discount campaigns. AMD has recently been hiding the sales figures for its Radeon graphics cards in gaming balance sheets, which also include all semi-custom processors for game consoles such as the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X, so as not to have to go into the minuses of desktop GPUs. And yet the prices for graphics cards are still excessive. Allow what?

The current graphics card generation with AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3000 is almost two years old. To date, the price of most models is well above the price recommendations given at market launch. For example, the cheapest GeForce RTX 3070 costs 560 euros in a price comparison – Nvidia’s original RRP was 500 euros. For the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, the cheapest retail price is 480 euros to 400 euros RRP. Recently, the prices have even risen again in some cases, for example with the GeForce RTX 3080 from now 800 euros.

At AMD, at least two of the models presented in 2020 are just under the RRP: the Radeon RX 6900 XT from just under 900 euros and the Radeon RX 6700 XT from 470 euros.

Do not be fooled

Larger discounts are only recognizable for the more recent new editions and high-end models, but with RRP comparisons AMD and Nvidia are played into the narrative of the oh-so-great graphics card prices. Because with models like the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, Radeon RX 6950 XT and Radeon RX 6750 XT, the high demand, primarily from crypto miners, had long been priced in. This crypto demand collapsed practically overnight.

Meanwhile, AMD seems to be generally not interested in price movements in retail. In the official store – operated by Digital River – prices increase weekly, more or less in parallel with the euro-US dollar exchange rate. A Radeon RX 6950 XT currently costs a slim 1310 euros. And it doesn’t look any better in the USA either – at Newegg, for example, the RRPs are diligently exceeded.

… especially not from current discounts

Alleged discount campaigns such as the “Nvidia Summer Sale” with “over 80 graphics cards at heavily reduced prices” (written in bold in Nvidia’s mail) seem like a mockery of everyone who has been waiting for an affordable gaming graphics card for two years. In the very first “Deal Highlight”, for example, an Aorus GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Xtreme Waterforce 24G is advertised for 1649 instead of 1779 euros.

That’s a middle finger to all gamers who the manufacturers want to curry favor with after two years of disinterest by trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of the aging generation of graphics cards. Well, thanks. I’d rather stick with my mid-range GPU, which is almost four years old. Especially when AMD is already advertising its RX 7000 series for the end of the year and Nvidia boss Jensen Huang is putting off analysts with the RTX 4000 series.