If you’ve held out these couple of years to upgrade your graphics card, good news: the long, painful drought of affordable GPUs seems to be easing, finally.
For nearly two years, it was a lottery to buy a new Nvidia RTX or AMD Radeon card at a sane price, where scalpers always seemed to have the winning ticket. Prices go up to two or three times MSRP, stock vanished in minutes, and plenty of gamers simply gave up. But lately, things are taking a turn.
Retailers have inventory sitting on shelves, and prices are steadily inching down. According to Tom’s Hardware, some recent reports indicate that card sales are dropping by more than 10% month over month. Not exactly clearance-bin territory, but compared to the nightmare of 2021, it’s progress.
Scalpers, meanwhile, are not investing in GPUs for now like they used to. According to Tom’s Hardware and The Verge, even buyers don’t seem to be willing to pay for the most in-demand graphics cards when marked up threefold. That means few quick flips, less incentive for resellers, and good opportunities for normal buyers to get a card at near-retail pricing.
Is the Situation Getting Better? Should You Invest in a New GPU?
Before you move to the checkout, let’s keep this grounded. Prices are falling, but they’re not cheap. Many models still cost a couple of hundred bucks over MSRP. Remember last summer when finding an RTX 3080 for “only” $200 above retail was like winning the lottery? That’s still the ballpark. But with more frequent restocks and less reseller pressure, the market is clearly stabilizing.
There’s another factor in play, new silicon is arriving soon. Nvidia’s next-gen Lovelace GPUs and AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture are both expected soon. Manufacturers and retailers know they can’t keep mountains of older stock with the shipment of new cards, so they’re more willing to shave margins to clear inventory. So, current-gen prices soften because everyone is ready for the next wave.
So, should you upgrade now? It depends. If you’ve so far limped along on a GTX 1060 and your patience wore thin sometime around the Cyberpunk launch, now’s a decent time to upgrade. You won’t be gouged nearly as hard, and the performance leap will be enormous. But if you can wait a few more months, the release of Lovelace and RDNA 3 could push prices down further or give you a new toy worth paying full price for.
The global chip shortage isn’t “fixed” by itself, and PS5 is still annoyingly scarce. But for PC gamers, the clouds are finally parting. Affordable might still be a stretch, but they are attainable. After two years of sky-high prices and empty shelves drama, that’s a win worth celebrating.