Nvidia and AMD GPUs are returning to shelves and prices are finally falling – The Verge

For nearly two years, netting a PS5, Xbox Series X, or AMD Radeon and Nvidia RTX graphics cards without paying a fortune has been a matter of luck (or a lot of skill). At its peak, scalpers were successfully charging double or even triple MSRP for a modern GPU. But it’s looking like the great GPU shortage is nearly over.

In January, sites including Tom’s Hardware reported that prices were finally beginning to drop, and drop they did; they’ve now dropped an average of 30 percent in the three months since. On eBay, the most popular graphics cards are only commanding a street price of $200–$300 over MSRP. And while that might still seem like a lot, some have fallen further: used Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti or AMD RX 6900 XT are currently fetching less than their original asking price, a sure sign that sanity is returning to the marketplace.

Just as importantly, some graphics cards are actually staying in stock at retailers when their prices are too high — again, something that sounds perfectly normal but that we haven’t seen in a while. For many months, boutiques like my local retailer Central Computers could only afford to sell you a GPU as part of a big PC bundle, but now it’s making every card available on its own. GameStop is selling a Radeon RX 6600 for just $10 over MSRP, and it hasn’t yet sold out. Newegg has also continually been offering an RTX 3080 Ti for just $10 over MSRP (after rebate, too) — even if $1,200 still seems high for that card’s level of performance.

If you’re willing to pay a markup, there are plenty more: a quick scan shows me the price floor of an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti has fallen to around $580, 3070 Ti to $700, and 3080 to around $1,000 at retail, with some retailers boasting an “instant savings” or “instant rebate” rather than lowering their prices across the board. Some, like Asus, say they’re passing along savings to customers now that a Trump-era tariff on GPUs has expired. In Germany, retail prices have dipped to just between 12 and 19 percent over MSRP, according to 3DCenter, which has been tracking those prices longer than anyone.

“At this point you can have a card from any tier for prices people would have jumped for three months ago,” says Falcodrin, the full-time GPU hunter I interviewed last December. And Falcodrin is pretty sure the prices will continue to fall — because even as supply begins to catch up, demand has fallen off.

“Everyone is unwilling to pay now. Part of that is probably just they got their card, part of that’s probably tax season, and part of it is that US consumer sentiment is as low as it’s been since 2008,” Falcodrin tells The Verge, admitting that his own business has been rough as cryptocurrency miners close up shop and inflation continues to soar.

So, if Nvidia and AMD’s partners want to sell their stock of GPUs, they may soon be competing with one another to lower prices once more.

With many prices still $200 over MSRP, we’re not out of the woods yet, but nobody’s selling GPUs or consoles for double or triple what they’re worth anymore. On eBay, only two graphics cards — the RTX 3070 and 3060 Ti — are selling for more than 1.5 times their MSRP on average. Another encouraging sign is that the number of GPUs changing hands in a week has dropped by over half since March, suggesting they’re much less attractive to scalpers.

One thing that might surprise you is that Sony’s PlayStation 5 is still holding its value on eBay, fetching an average of $703 for the disc drive model, roughly the same as we saw in January and still 1.4 times its MSRP. That, even though the street price of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X fell 20 percent during the same period to $547 (just $48 over MSRP). The Xbox Series S, meanwhile, is no longer a scalping target at all since it’s been readily available for months at its $299 sticker price. Good!

At the rate prices and volumes are falling, eBay may not be a valuable price checking tool for long — and that’s exactly the way we want it because that’ll mean that sanity has returned.

Then again, there’s a decent chance Nvidia and AMD announce new higher-priced cards before that happens, like the rumored RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, and there’ll always be something else to scalp. The Steam Deck is currently fetching an average of over $1,000 on eBay in case you’re wondering. Fun!