After two years of skyrocketing, it seems that the price of graphics cards is falling again. Despite this, Jon Peddie Research’s report on the evolution of the price of graphics cards could not be more enlightening. Over the last decade, the average price of gaming graphics cards has multiplied by four.
We have seen in recent years how a series of factors have come together that have triggered prices. On the one hand, there is the closure of production plants due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This factor has been added to the increase in demand for graphics cards for mining Ethereum (among other cryptocurrencies). A combination of factors that has generated chaos in prices.
The price of graphics cards has quadrupled in just ten years
According to this report, in 2008 and until 2010, the average price of graphics cards was around 200 dollars. During 2010 the price of graphics cards exceeded this barrier. we see how in 2014 the barrier was broken 300 dollarsyes A slight drop in prices is observed in 2015, but not below the $300 barrier. From 2016 onwards, the price of graphics cards has only gone up.
As we can see in the graph, in 2019 the average price was slightly above 400 dollars. Last year 2021the average price stayed very close to the top of the 800 dollars. We are talking about practically doubling the price of graphics cards in just two years.
We have, on the one hand, the increase in prices due to the pandemic, component shortages, demand for telecommuting and demand for mining, added to the typical demand for gaming. Factors that have led to an excessive price increase.
We can see in a table how the price of NVIDIA’s high-end has prices unimaginable a couple of years ago. The RTX 3090 costs $1,499, but they have been sold for more than $3,000. The same goes for the RTX 3090 Ti which costs $1,999 and retails for more than $3,800. They are absurd figures that are not justified by anything.
A pretty devastating report.
Within the report it is stated that The manufacturers of GPUs (NVIDIA and AMD) and the assemblers of the same (ASUS, Gigabyte, etc) they’re not making much more money. Here who is taking the slice is the intermediary who buys the graphic and resells it for between 50-100% more than its original price.
According to the report, gamers should remain unmoved and reject these inflated products. Not buying graphics at these pointless prices will mean that speculators will be left with that hardware gathering dust. In addition, the assemblers will be launching new stock of graphics cards. This will cause prices to become reasonable again, but it will not be in the short term, it will be gradual.
The report emphasizes that returning to average prices of 200 dollars in graphics is unthinkable. We could go to prices of about 500 dollars on average per graphics card, more or less. We must take into account inflation, manufacturing nodes are becoming more expensive to develop and special machines are required.
