Graphics Card Prices Doubled on Average Between 2020 and 2023: Mindfactory Data

[kapone32]

Actually the 7900XTX is, in many games it comes close to the 4090. The XT version on the other hand should be U$50-100 cheaper.

In my Country the 7900XT brand that I got was $1299 and the XTX version was $1699. For me $400 was definitely worth it to get the XT.

 

[thesmokingman]

Imo this started with the Titans. At first it was an outlier, but with enough price training and FOMO ppl have become accustomed to baller 1K plus gpus.

 

[Testsubject01]

which is why im not buying jack shit...now if just more people would be like me.....

There are dozens of us… DOZENS!

 

[pf100]

I'm not sure why anyone is paying these ridiculous prices. I got a used 3080 for $450 last October. You're probably thinking that I'm saying, "hey, look at me. I found a way to get decent price to performance during an industry-wide cash grab", and if you did you'd be right.

 

[kapone32]

Imo this started with the Titans. At first it was an outlier, but with enough price training and FOMO ppl have become accustomed to baller 1K plus gpus.

For me it was the real profit that you could make with Mining. AMD;s best card was the Vega 7 and generally not available while the 3070-3090 were all at least 80 h/s vs AMD's best at about 75 h/s for the 6950XT vs 125 for the 3090. That meant at least 80% more h/s for Mining operations. Put yourself back to mid 2021 and remember a story that was in the media but not on the news. The residents of a town in Alberta started making noise complaints coming from the old mine outside of town. When it was investigated a mining group had bought the mine and were using it's power grid to mine GPUs. They estimated that they were mining $100000 a month in Etherium. That is only one of example of the context behind Nvidia's market share domination. Fanboys can wax on about Ray Tracing and DLSS but the most true in statement in the bible is "The love of money is the root of all evil". We use the word Greed to describe that today but plenty of users like the one described exhibited the same behaviour as Nvidia. When Nvidia started selling their cards directly to Miners (Shelves were empty for 10 months)> Of course the other vendors were doing the same thing on the other side of the world as none of their cards were available either.

The human mind is flawed to accept propaganda without context. People will complain about how bad the 6500XT is but if you bought one when 6600s were north of $550 for $215 you would be as happy as the overwhelming amount of positive user reviews on every etailer that sells them. So much that regardless of the narrative that card is more expensive today than when it launched.

I am a PC fan, I have been around Computers since I was 9 so it is a part of me. Today my only real interest is Gaming and I have always used AMD for GPUs since Nvidia burned me by gimping my GPU with a driver update and dropping SLI support (GTS 450 look it up) and I don't mean 2020. Intel is looking very tempting though. We need to buy more to force AMD and Nvidia to lower their prices. The issue is if either company drops their prices by 15 to 20% that they will not be able to keep up with demand. "Anecdote data, the Minecraft kids are now getting Fortnite PCs. Fortunately their parents for the most part will look at price and buy the AMD card because it is cheaper and has more VRAM."

I will tell you a story about propaganda. In Grade 9 I made the basketball team. That year was the first year of Air Jordans. The mind and Saturday afternoon NCAA basketball commercials made me dream about those shoes. I was able to convince my Mother to take me to the store to get some shoes for the Opening Game.

We went to BATA shoes, as soon as we entered the store I saw them. I hurried over to where the shoes were on display and when my Mom arrived she looked at the price (It was 3 000s) and said that was not happening. Crestfallen, she could see that I was and said "Lets look around the store to see if there is any other shoe that you could use". We walked around the store and she came onto some Air Jordan facsimiles from Bata. Instead of I swoosh going up this had another swoosh going down and was made of canvas for $39.99. I was broodish silent the whole way home and was not satisfied (She just did not understand).

When I went to school the next day it was generally forgotten about until it was time for the Game and we were in the Change Room. Feeling like a rabbit among Wolves I sheepishly reached in my bag and pulled out my shoes. When I had the confidence to raise my eyes exactly 9 other players on the team had the exact same shoe as me. The 2 players that had Air Jordans actually became the ball boys by the end of the season.

 

[ymdhis]

The current market share dominance by nvidia isn't due to mining, it's because AMD purposefully holds back its stock of cards. They outright said they do that in their last report.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Imo this started with the Titans. At first it was an outlier, but with enough price training and FOMO ppl have become accustomed to baller 1K plus gpus.

Nope. The titan was a return to the norms. The 8800gtx ultra, adjusted for inflation, was a $1100 card. Even at the time, a $830 GPU in the year before the great crash was too much for most. But it did in fact sell well.

People remember the time of $500 top end fermis and think it was always that way. It wasnt, that was a knock on effect from the Great Recession.

The current market share dominance by nvidia isn't due to mining, it's because AMD purposefully holds back its stock of cards. They outright said they do that in their last report.

To think, if they had simply flooded the market with upcharged RX 6000 series back in 2020 and early 2021 they would have made an absolute killing, since you couldnt get anything.

The AMD line always smelled a little bit. If they wanted to keep up prices why would you restrict so much supply that your market share evaporates in less then a year? Handing your competitor the market on a silver platter did not work out well in 2016 and it isnt working well now either. I still think much of their "oh we restricted supply" argument is cope for their inability to get product out the door. In 2022 it's absolutely the reason why prices didnt fully come back to earth, but they seem to have had a REALLY hard time selling much of anything during the Great Lockdowns.

Of course, AMD's behaviour to AI now is the same attitude they had with rDNA, so......thank god for intel?

 

[pf100]

The current market share dominance by nvidia isn't due to mining, it's because AMD purposefully holds back its stock of cards. They outright said they do that in their last report.

That was misinterpreted by almost everybody. AMD shipped fewer cards because demand is down.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Well it is obvious.

As is the cause, fewer mid and low end cards.


And all round way higher prices.

For once only a fool would debate mindfactories findings.

Stuff is dearer.

But so are beans milk and eggs sooooo.

 

[ThrashZone]

I disagree.

While it's not news that graphic cards are MUCH MORE expensive on average now than 3 years ago, the fact that they are on average DOUBLE the price IS NEWS.

Hi,
Yeah no miners to blame either
Maybe nvidia didn't get the memo mining died

I'm not sure why anyone is paying these ridiculous prices. I got a used 3080 for $450 last October. You're probably thinking that I'm saying, "hey, look at me. I found a way to get decent price to performance during an industry-wide cash grab", and if you did you'd be right.

More dollars than sense

 

[skates]

I paid around $1400 when my water cooled 280Ti was released and did not upgrade until last weekend when I bought a water cooled 4090 for $1800. That's $400 more from when the 2080Ti was released until 4090 was released and the 4090 is double the performance. I would say that the additional $400 to double performance from when both were released is a good deal, at least for me.

If you upgrade each year, then yes the costs are getting out of hand, but if you skip a generation then it doesn't hurt as much.

 

[mechtech]

Ehhhhhh

pre covid to covid peak was about 400%

 

[Deleted member 177333]

Eh, those of us with spending discipline haven't been affected at all. I haven't spent a cent more than I otherwise would have over the last few years, just stopped buying new stuff and bought used stuff on ebay with regard to GPUs.

I see that $1500 price tag on the 4090 with the wrong type of cooler and chuckle. Nope. When it's at $1k or less with a pre-installed wb, I will pull the trigger. As long as people are okay with these insane prices and keep forking over cash it just sends a clear message to the retailer & manufacturer to keep on cranking the prices up more.

 

[claes]

Unless you are Dell, HP, Amazon, Google, etc, Amd and nvidia do not care if you buy their product or not. Don’t know how this myth keeps getting perpetuated.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Well duh!

At least the 7900XT in Australia is a lot cheaper than the 6800XT was selling for due to the crypto scum, but still stupidly priced. I just got a second hand MSI Gaming Trio X 6800XT for half the price of the 7900XT and couldn't be happier. I will wait for RDNA3 refresh or consider a 4080 if it gets a $300US price cut.

 

[InhaleOblivion]

Ah GPU's making the increase in gas prices over the same 3 years look affordable.

 

[NoneRain]

They can price them as high as they want, I just refuse to buy any overpriced cut down card (even more on every generation, look at the upcoming 4060), period.

If only the majority thought like that, NVIDIA/AMD would be working their asses to make good cost-effective products.

 

[loracle706]

Thieves !!

 

[claes]

If only the majority thought like that, NVIDIA/AMD would be working their asses to make good cost-effective products.

They really wouldn't. They're barely selling their high-end/high-margin cards as is, and we're a tiny part of their revenue.

 

[EmerilLIVE]

Nope. The titan was a return to the norms. The 8800gtx ultra, adjusted for inflation, was a $1100 card. Even at the time, a $830 GPU in the year before the great crash was too much for most. But it did in fact sell well.

People remember the time of $500 top end fermis and think it was always that way. It wasnt, that was a knock on effect from the Great Recession.

To think, if they had simply flooded the market with upcharged RX 6000 series back in 2020 and early 2021 they would have made an absolute killing, since you couldnt get anything.

The AMD line always smelled a little bit. If they wanted to keep up prices why would you restrict so much supply that your market share evaporates in less then a year? Handing your competitor the market on a silver platter did not work out well in 2016 and it isnt working well now either. I still think much of their "oh we restricted supply" argument is cope for their inability to get product out the door. In 2022 it's absolutely the reason why prices didnt fully come back to earth, but they seem to have had a REALLY hard time selling much of anything during the Great Lockdowns.

Of course, AMD's behaviour to AI now is the same attitude they had with rDNA, so......thank god for intel?

The 8800 Ultra was a thing, but it did not sell the way high-end GPU's sell today. I'm trying to remember what GPU I had between my MX 440 & 8800 GT, but for the life of me I can't right now, I do remember that there was no real consideration of buying the original nVidia 8000 series & the 8800 GT was bought after significant price drops. Consider that the 9800 GT, which was just a refresh of the 8800 GT debut at MSRP of $160 vs. $349 for the 8800 GT less than a year later. It wasn't too long after that I got a decent job & had money to spend that I ended up with two 9800 GTX's in SLI, which was the first I ever had a high-end PC instead of a typical midrange gaming build.

 

[Why_Me]

This exact behavior is why the majority of Americans are drowning in debt (and most of the western world isnt far off).


I dont know why anyone is surprised. Hey, remember when three years ago the world's governments racted to the *unspecified virus of unknown origin* by increasing the world's money supply by 50-75% in half a year? Shockingly, the evil nasty people who called out that this would cause hyperinflation were.....right.


"overpriced" is relative. Look at nvidia's margins for 2020 and 2022, and they are both in the same rough mid to upper 50% range that they've been in for over a decade now. 2021 was an outlier at over 60%.

It's not just nvidia greed, everything is far more expensive today. My grocery bill has gone from ~$35 a week to over $60, for the same selection. My heating bill went from $39 a month to $127. The price of everything has shot up. That's what happens in hyperinflation, real inflation was 16% last year, not 8%, and it was similar the year before, much like the definition of "recession", the government has repeatedly changed the CPI calculator to avoid the inconvenient truth of inflation.

The $400 GPU today is the $200 CPU of 2016. There's no getting around it, short of an economic collapse on par with 2008 that plunges the majority into poverty and suppresses wages for another decade.

It's because they spend more money than they bring in. Maybe they should make simple accounting in high school a mandatory class.

 

[Bomby569]

the prices will come down when crypto craziness is over they said

inflation only works one way, up. the prices never come down again, companies will kill baby seals if they have to not to let that happen.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

the prices will come down when crypto craziness is over they said

inflation only works one way, up. the prices never come down again, companies will kill baby seals if they have to not to let that happen.

That's a pretty limited view of economics. In one sense, you're right: Inflation only goes up because "going up" is baked into the entire concept, and price trends over time will inevitably follow given the current system. But "over time" is key: market prices, inflation-adjusted or not, can easily go down. Any long-term price chart of an arbitrary commodity can provide examples of the former. Cases of the latter are also not rare. The GPU situation is galling because it bucks the historical trend of the unit cost of a given amount of computing power going down. The amount of CPU that you can get for $200 relative to twenty or even ten years ago is just silly. Even now (in the US) we spend a significantly lesser proportion of our income on food than in the early 20th century.

A slide in GPU prices faces resistance from many fronts. Investment markets have become extremely intolerant of real or perceived weakness. Dips in revenue or profitability are no longer expected events to be weathered, but red flags to trigger a sell. The consumer graphics market looks to be more-or-less sated in the low and midrange, so the manufacturers are looking to keep revenue numbers up by elevating ASPs since volume isn't doing the trick. Then there's the shift in the large-scale computing landscape. Even outside of crypto, there are many computing sectors that have learned to take advantage of the parallelism inherent in graphics processors. Ten years ago, consumer-bound products were the largest slice of the revenue pie by a good margin. Now there's all sorts of "industrial" clients willing to buy chips cut from the same silicon at a much higher margin. If you're Nvidia, who are you going to care about? AMD doesn't have the same presence in that market, but they're more than willing to ride the pricing wave that NV creates.

Anyway, TL;DR, graphics prices probably won't come down any time soon (upward price pressure is nearly always stronger than downward), but that doesn't mean they can't.

 

[Bomby569]

That's a pretty limited view of economics. In one sense, you're right: Inflation only goes up because "going up" is baked into the entire concept, and price trends over time will inevitably follow given the current system. But "over time" is key: market prices, inflation-adjusted or not, can easily go down. Any long-term price chart of an arbitrary commodity can provide examples of the former. Cases of the latter are also not rare. The GPU situation is galling because it bucks the historical trend of the unit cost of a given amount of computing power going down. The amount of CPU that you can get for $200 relative to twenty or even ten years ago is just silly. Even now (in the US) we spend a significantly lesser proportion of our income on food than in the early 20th century.

A slide in GPU prices faces resistance from many fronts. Investment markets have become extremely intolerant of real or perceived weakness. Dips in revenue or profitability are no longer expected events to be weathered, but red flags to trigger a sell. The consumer graphics market looks to be more-or-less sated in the low and midrange, so the manufacturers are looking to keep revenue numbers up by elevating ASPs since volume isn't doing the trick. Then there's the shift in the large-scale computing landscape. Even outside of crypto, there are many computing sectors that have learned to take advantage of the parallelism inherent in graphics processors. Ten years ago, consumer-bound products were the largest slice of the revenue pie by a good margin. Now there's all sorts of "industrial" clients willing to buy chips cut from the same silicon at a much higher margin. If you're Nvidia, who are you going to care about? AMD doesn't have the same presence in that market, but they're more than willing to ride the pricing wave that NV creates.

Anyway, TL;DR, graphics prices probably won't come down any time soon (upward price pressure is nearly always stronger than downward), but that doesn't mean they can't.

I'm just stating the obvious and confirmed by the companies themselves, they managed production and inventories so prices would never go back down. This happens across all industries. That's just a fact. It's what is happening in tech.
I guess if you sell milk and there is a million producers and hundreds of companies you can't do that, but that is also not relevant for this forum or this topic.

 

[ZoneDymo]

Well enjoy torturing yourself then. I like playing games more than religiously complaining about prices and the nature of the corporate beast.
I have some news for you: Cheap PC hardware days are over. It's a niche market with no competition and they will milk us dry. You decide. Do you like games, or do you want to spend the next 30 years sitting on an RX480 and hope for a miracle that will never come?

you seem frustrated with your own actions, dont blame me for your mistakes.