Why it matters: Things aren't looking good for anyone looking to buy a new graphics card. After several weeks of prices falling rapidly towards their MSRP, both Nvidia's RTX 3000 series and AMD's Radeon RX 6000 cards saw their average prices rise during August.
The latest figures from 3DCenter.org, which looks at average selling prices of Ampere/RDNA 2 cards at retailers in Germany, show team green's products rising 9% throughout August to 59% above MSRP, while AMD's cards were up 5% to 64% above MSRP.
For Nvidia, the data reverses a trend that has seen the average price of the RTX 3000 series fall for over three months. It was at a high of over 200% more than MSRP in mid-May, declining to 50% in early August---the lowest since the year began.
It's been a slightly different story for AMD. The Radeon 6000 series' price peaked at 114% above MSRP before falling to 53% in early July, but it's slowly been on the increase since then and is now slightly above Nvidia at 64%. While the figures are from Germany, they reflect a global pattern.
Our own GPU availability and pricing update for August also shows card prices (on eBay) rising by a few percent points.
| MSRP | eBay Average Price June | eBay Average Price July | eBay Average Price August | Current Price Inflation | Price Increase July to August | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GeForce RTX 3090 | $1,500 | $2,962 | $2,599 | $2,607 | 74% | 0% |
| GeForce RTX 3080 Ti | $1,200 | $2,187 | $1,905 | $1,815 | 51% | -5% |
| GeForce RTX 3080 | $700 | $1,948 | $1,623 | $1,643 | 135% | 1% |
| GeForce RTX 3070 Ti | $600 | $1,323 | $1,085 | $1,170 | 95% | 8% |
| GeForce RTX 3070 | $500 | $1,261 | $1,075 | $1,228 | 146% | 14% |
| GeForce RTX 3060 Ti | $400 | $1,255 | $1,012 | $952 | 138% | -6% |
| GeForce RTX 3060 | $330 | $830 | $723 | $752 | 128% | 4% |
| Average | 109% | 2% |
Availability also gotten worse since the start of the month. Whereas only the RTX 3070 and 3070 Ti failed to achieve four out of five stars in the previous report, the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 are also rated at 3/5 in the latest edition.
It's even worse for AMD. The RX 6800 is now the most difficult card to find at German retailers, ranked at 1/5 for availability. The RX 6600 XT and RX 6900 XT both score 3/5, and the RX 6700 XT and RX 6900 XT get 4/5.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang recently said the supply issues plaguing graphics cards would last throughout next year, and with TSMC set to increase contract pricing by up to 20 percent, expect this sad situation to last for a while. On the positive side, AMD could be releasing its own line of mining-specific graphics cards, which might ameliorate the issues to some extent. And all this is despite GPU shipments increasing 42% in Q2.