It's taken a minute or three, but graphics card prices are finally starting to normalize. In some cases, you can even find a GPU selling for below its launch price, something that was unheard of over the past year or so. This is all happening as the cryptocurrency market finds itself in a bit of a tailspin. That's not likely a coincidence.
AMD and NVIDIA have always been vague about how many of their GPUs end up in the hands of cryptocurrency miners. That's largely because it's a stat that is difficult to track, even more so when factoring in casual miners (like gamers who might have mined Ethereum and other crypto when stepping away from their PCs, but didn't devote a system entirely to mining).
For the most part, there has been a correlation between GPU street pricing trends as they relate to MSRP, and the cryptocurrency market. That doesn't mean crypto is the sole cause of rising and falling GPUs prices, but most would agree it is playing a role to some extent.
In any event, the folks at 3DCenter have continually monitored GPU street price trends based on the average cost at “major German retailers,” and plots it out each month. Here's the latest iteration of that ongoing graph…
Source: 3DCenter.org
At their peak, GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards were selling for 218 percent above MSRP, while AMD Radeon RX 6000 GPUs commanded 116 percent above launch pricing. That was the situation in May 2021. Fast forward to know and NVIDIA's graphics cards are just 2 percent above MSRP on average, while AMD's cards have dropped 8 percent below.
As the site points out, a lot has happened in the past few weeks to help drive prices down. Chief among them is that ETH profitability is less than a tenth of what it was in May of last year. We wrote about this recently, noting that the cryptocurrency market crashed so hard that it's no longer profitable to mine ETH in some places.
There's a trickle down effect at play, too. With crypto mining taking a nose dive, miners have begun flooding the market with used GPUs. This has increased availability, which in turn has helped push prices down.
Another factor is that both AMD and NVIDIA are expected to launch next-generation graphics card this year. It's hard to ignore all the leaks and rumors, and rather than pay MSRP-level prices for GPUs that are about to become last-gen products, many gamers are undoubtedly waiting for Ada Lovelace (NVIDIA) and RDNA 3 (AMD) to arrive.
