Pakistan Designs GPU Memory-based Import Duty Calculation for its Airports

[btarunr]

Graphics Cards sold in the regular market in Pakistan are vastly expensive compared to those bought in the West. This is due to the country's heavy taxation of levied on the products—which can be up to 36% of the sales price—besides retailer mark-ups. Some gamers prefer to import their cards by having friends or family returning from abroad bring along a graphics card purchased abroad, or have them ship it over. The Pakistani government developed an innovative way to assess import-duty on these cards in the wake of people undervaluing the goods—memory.

Customs officers now have a government guideline on what to assume the market-price of a graphics card could be. A 4 GB card will be assessed as a USD 65 product, a 6 GB card as $98, an 8 GB card as $196, a 10 GB card as $262, a 12 GB card as $328, a 16 GB card as $468, and a 24 GB card as $540. As techies on the Pakistani social media have rightly pointed out, this will incentivize people to choose graphics cards with the lower amount of memory within a performance segment. For example, the Radeon RX 6800 XT with its 16 GB of memory stands no chance against the GeForce RTX 3080 10 GB, with the two cards being assessed vastly differently for customs duty. Between the 8 GB and 4 GB variants of a card, such as the RX 6500 XT, it makes vastly more sense to opt for the 4 GB variant.



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[JAB Creations]

GOVERNMENT OF PAKISTAN, all capital letters = a criminal corporation (not a government) so that is sad: Pakistan is also an anarchist state. Always save your receipts, taxes are literal theft and there is paper work you can file against these criminal organizations because they have to maintain that false public image that they're actually a government.

 

[thelawnet]

BTW the tax is 36% of the arbitrary value, so $23 on 4GB, $35 on 6GB, $71 on 8GB, $120 on 12GB.

So this would favour the 4GB 6500 XT, and the 6GB 2060 (which is a better card, and cheaper, than the 3050)

It would mean you'd tend to buy the 8GB 3060 Ti over the far worse 12GB 3060.

 

[ixi]

Bucket bottom lickers not goverment. GPU are evil know.

Put in in fake gpu box where it is said 512MB and it will be for free.

 

[trsttte]

This is so dumb it hurts, what about just checking the actual value on a proof of purchase and compare it with public information against false statements for major discrepancies? Is it that difficult!?

No let's make a tax code for every class of product, is the tax the same for different types of GDDR? How about cache, does it also count? Or workstation cards, even older generations that will be cheaper and always have much more memory?

 

[Jimmy_]

Damn dude! this is hilarious way for charging on GPU

 

[JalleR]

well i guess Nvidia just need to make a Pakistan edition of the 4090 with 23,5GB memory

 

[Aquinus]

taxes are literal theft

Sure, if you don't live in a society.

 

[MarsM4N]

That's nuts. Guess they don't want their folks playing evil western games.

Makes me wonder is there also a tax on gaming consoles?