What a mine field
Analysis Gamers may not have to fight off cryptocurrency miners or pay scalped prices to get their hands on a GPU now, especially if they’re willing to pick up an Nvidia 30-series or AMD 6000-series card
Will that mean prices drop as far as they have risen, though?
Ethereum’s move to proof of stake this month – an overhaul dubbed the Merge – ended the need for people to mine the cryptocurrency and those based on it using powerful number-crunching graphics processors and similar accelerators. Instead investors now stake their Ether to facilitate transactions and keep the blockchain secure. For that and other reasons, the outsized demand we’ve come to know for GPUs has rapidly deflated. The electronics are easier to get hold of now as supply catches up with falling demand.
The glut of graphics cards is plain to see in packed display cases at brick’n’mortar retailers, with high-end AMD and Nvidia gear now selling for well below their MSRPs. Without much effort, you can now find Nvidia’s RTX 3090 TI, a card that launched at an MSRP of $1,999 barely six months ago, or AMD’s current flagship, the RX 6950 XT, on sale for less than $1,100.
More modest cards such as the 3060 TI or RX 6700 XT are now readily available at close to their MSRPs, something that in many cases we didn’t even see at launch thanks to the almost immediate price hikes driven by a GPU-starved market. Don’t forget, not long after its debut, the 3060 was selling for more than twice its MSRP, if you could find one in stock.
“I think that the reality is prices are still fairly high compared to what they’ve been historically, but overall I think compared to the last two years it’s much better,” Moor Insights and Strategy analyst Anshel Sag told The Register.
Early this summer, amid economic anxiety and other effects, cryptocurrencies began collapsing, with Bitcoin falling from more than $48,000 in March to under $19,000 in June.
