#GRAPHICS CARD SHORTAGE PC#
#GRAPHICS CARD SHORTAGE SERIES#

#GRAPHICS CARD SHORTAGE SERIES#

If you can't find RTX 30 series stock close to (or at) MSRP by now, then you may be better served in saving your money and waiting until the latter half of the year. Given that the graphics card shortage has raged on for almost two years now, we're nearing a point in time where the next generations are due to be upon us. Should you wait for the RTX 4000 series instead? This is because the prebuilt market has not been spiked in quite the same fashion.

#GRAPHICS CARD SHORTAGE PC#

The most cost-effective way right now to get your hands on new graphics cards is through either cheap gaming PC deals or one of the best gaming laptops. It's a point made by us on many occasions, though one that needs to be said again. Nothing is guaranteed, however, and given how volatile the market can be, we wouldn't be surprised to see spiking happening sooner rather than later.

The most recent analysis by suggests that graphics card prices are going to continue to fall through until the summer, when it's possible that we'll see the cheapest rates on the likes of the RTX 30 series and AMD Radeon RX 6000 line yet. However, we're also seeing the prices begin to fall, however minor that reduction is. It's evident that GPU prices reached their apex in May of last year, with outlandish price gouging from both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. This data shows a definitive through-line between the beginning of 2021 and the start of 2022. Why is this? Well, AMD's budget RDNA 2 GPU only runs 4GB GDDR6, whereas the RTX 3050 doubles up to 8GB, meaning it can technically mine, albeit poorly. Out of the two graphics cards released in January, the RX 6500 XT is still fairly affordable and available for its actual retail price, but the RTX 3050 is just as hard to get your hands on as the rest of the Ampere line. While the goal from both Nvidia and AMD may have been to provide an affordable entryway into current-generation PC gaming, the low barrier to entry meant that these GPUs were prime targets for scalpers looking to hoard them to resell at inflated rates. If we take the recent launches of the RX 6500 XT and RTX 3050 for instance, both video cards carried a modest price point ($199 and $249 respectively). We've covered many GPU launches over the past two years, and we can tell you that many day-one listings are often gone within a matter of minutes (if not seconds), save for a few rare circumstances. Whether human or bot, scalpers were keen to exploit the supply chain issues that caused the graphics card shortage. When you factor in that every RTX 30 series GPU has a minimum of 8GB GDDR6 memory starting with an MSRP of just $399, then it's no surprise that the cards were snatched up as soon as possible. We won't go into too much detail on this front, but let's just say that any graphics card with at least 8GB VRAM is able to mine popular cryptocurrencies, and it's easier than it has ever been to do so. Perhaps not in equal measure, but certainly a contributing factor is the rise of not only scalping but also crypto mining. That's only one side of the story, though. Are scalpers responsible for the graphics card shortage?

Graphics card shortage