Following the release of the NVIDIA RTX 30 series, the official recommended price for graphics cards was slightly lowered; however, the subsequent boom in cryptocurrency mining has caused the price of graphics cards to go out of control, and according to NVIDIA’s own data, on average users have had to pay an additional 300 dollars to buy any of them. their GPUs (although as we have seen, in Spain we have come to see prices in stores that were double the price recommended by the brand).
What about the price of NVIDIA graphics?
During this week’s investor conference, NVIDIA VP Jeff Fisher discussed sales of graphics cards based on the Ampere architecture, the RTX 30 series, saying they have sold millions of units, generating record revenue despite that what the company receives for the sales of its products has nothing to do with the real price that users pay.
If we approach this statement from another angle, what we can conclude from it is that if, for example, NVIDIA puts a PVPR (recommended retail price) of 699 Euros on a graphics card, it does not matter if the store then sells it at 699 or 999 Euros, they are going to earn the same money (so it implies that the difference that we are paying more is not taken by NVIDIA, but by the distributor, the store, or any other component of the chain).
Fisher also mentioned that today’s graphics cards offer more value than ever, which is why it is more worth paying a premium than before and this has been proven by gamers, as sales have broken all records. It seems clear that today gamers do not mind paying more money for the graphics card as long as it provides the performance what they were looking for.
So, will the graphics now be more expensive?
What NVIDIA has wanted to tell us with all this, or at least that is the conclusion that we draw, is that even if we put aside the increase in the price of graphics cards caused by high demand and lack of stock, gamers seem very willing to pay more for their graphics cards, since according to NVIDIA data even though this latest generation has been more expensive than the previous one (and the next one will be more expensive than this one), the level of sales has grown (generating them more income, of course, as you can see in the slide that we put in the previous section).
So, and answering the question from the head of this section, it indeed seems that graphics cards will be more and more expensive, and not because there is speculation or lack of stock, but because they offer more and more improvements, improvements that They have a lot of development effort, time and money behind them, which provide great benefits to players, and are worth paying for (or so NVIDIA says).
Maybe after this we reach the point where it costs more to buy a graphics card than all the other components of the PC (well, in high-end models it is already like that), but what we also have clear is that for many improvements and performance that offer us in the top-of-the-range models, in the end the best-selling graphics are always those of mid-range.
