Graphics card prices have continued to improve through April, reports 3D Center Germany in its Easter weekend roundup. Compared to three weeks ago, AMD GPU prices have declined 13% on average, while Nvidia GPUs have dipped by -6%. It is immediately evident that Nvidia's GPU price decline rate is slowing, as you can see in the graph below.
The Nvidia graphics card pricing curve appears to be flattening in April. The source site says that it may be an indicator that "the time of rapid price reductions is now over." However, these kinds of supply/demand pricing curves are not always smooth or so easily predictable.
3D Center's previous figures showed both Nvidia and AMD GPUs were both ~25% over MSRPs at the end of March. This might have been enough to tempt some Nvidia fans who had sheltered from the storm over the preceding months. On the other side of the equation, the Nvidia GPU supply might have slowed for some reason or other in the last few weeks. Obviously, something is different in Nvidia-world and AMD-land, as after both being 25% over MSRP at the end of March, Nvidia GPUs are now 19% over MSRP, and AMD GPUs are now 12% over MSRP, on average.
The source site is German and considers a host of online stores in the country to work out its average pricing and availability charts. The German market looks quite competitive as it charts nine eShops, and we know there will be graphics cards for sale elsewhere online, like at Amazon Germany or eBay Germany.
One other note about the German results is that they don't include GeForce RTX 3090 Ti cards. These halo GPUs were launched and made available at list price almost immediately, without much in the way of supply problems. Moreover, the RTX 3080 12GB isn't included as it doesn't have an official MSRP.
MSRP Isn't Low Enough, and Computex Is Coming
GPU pricing would normally be 10 to 20% below MSRP at this point in the refresh cycle. We think that AMD will do a last quick refresh of its Radeon RX 6000 series before it builds up for the Radeon RX 7000 launch later in the year. Meanwhile, the recently launched GeForce RTX 3090 Ti looks like the conclusion of the Ampere family, with Ada Lovelace GPUs due in the autumn.
With the next-gen graphics cards being pretty easy to wait for, this time in the GPU refresh cycle would normally only attract buyers with decent price cuts. However, if Nvidia's price decline doesn't change by the beginning of May, then its cards will end up 13% over MSRP by that time. Likewise, if AMD's price decline doesn't waver, the average price in early May will be at parity with MSRP.
Ethereum cryptocurrency valuations seem to have largely decoupled from GPU pricing, which is welcome to see. However, perhaps the best news PC component bargain hunters could see are some convincing leaks regarding the capabilities and pricing of the next-gen GPUs from all parties.
Continuing to hold stocks of current-gen graphics cards gets ever riskier as people learn more about the appeal of Ada and RDNA3. Traditional trade show timelines suggest that we could learn quite a bit about the new graphics microarchitectures at Computex time (starts on Tuesday, May 24).
US Graphics Card Market
The above news looks at data from the German GPU market. We have our own monthly price watch, considering US pricing and availability once a month, the Tom's Hardware GPU Pricing Index. However, with the significant moves we observed last month, we also decided to add a mid-month update.
Having a quick nose around the US graphics card market this Easter, it is notable that Newegg appeared to have stocks of every GPU we checked for. Use the site's handy "in stock" power search toggle (upper left) to save you time and zero in on what is on offer – and available.