CES 2022 was full of expensive products most people can’t afford. But Nvidia and AMD recommitted to a budget market that they had seemingly left behind.
Nvidia and AMD announced new budget graphics cards at CES 2022: The $199 RX 6500 XT for AMD, and the $249 RTX 3050 for Nvidia. Even with rumors of these cards floating around, I didn’t expect to actually see them — and I didn’t expect AMD and Nvidia to price them around $200. Prices of graphics cards have been going up, and over the past few generations, Nvidia and AMD have continued to distance their mainline products from their budget offerings. CES 2022 forced AMD and Nvidia to reckon with the current prices of graphics cards, and the RX 6500 XT and RTX 3050 seem like a winning pair in a time when graphics options are few and far between. Nvidia never released an RTX 2050, at least not on desktop. The company stuck with the $329 RTX 2060 as its cheapest card from the previous generation, letting the older GTX 10-series and 16-series GPUs fill in the gap for the budget crowd. AMD had an RX 5500 XT last generation, but that was before AMD had flagships that could compete with Nvidia’s best. Both Nvidia and AMD have had budget options over the past few years — the RX 500 cards for AMD and GTX 16-series for Nvidia — but they never matched up to the mainline cards. And going into the current generation of GPUs, it seemed that graphics cards around $200 were all but dead, with Nvidia and AMD asking higher prices and hopeful buyers happy to pay it. At CES this year, AMD and Nvidia needed to address the GPU shortage that has left many machines with graphics cards that are woefully out of date.
