3DCenter has published a GPU market pricing analysis which updates German pricing trends up to July 18th. The news isn't the best; it seems that the pricing decline is levelling off, with a minimal 3% average price drop for Nvidia's RTX 30-series. AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series pricing, however, has bounced slightly up an equivalent 3%.
Despite the massive reduction in pricing compared to previous May highs, which saw NVIDIA's RTX 30-series selling on average at three times their MSRP, prices are still inflated across the market, with Nvidia's latest-gen graphics cards still commanding 50% higher street price than their launch MSRP. AMD buyers have a slightly worse situation on their hands - over on team red, pricing is 56% higher than the MSRP.
Graphics Card Prices in 🇩🇪🇦🇹 July 18, 2021👉 Party is over, price reductions hit full brakes.👉 Availability is the same or slightly better.👉 Without any notable movement, it's difficult to predict when retail prices will come close to MSRP.https://t.co/x8VWKEZIEr pic.twitter.com/xIuOcYEDzSJuly 19, 2021
For official resellers and the second-hand market alike, it's all a matter of attempting to maintain margins. German resellers have to balance their prices, for cards already in stock and bought at increased prices from distributors who themselves have increased margins due to the unprecedented supply/demand ratio for graphics cards ever since launch of both Nvidia and AMD's offerings. It's a tricky business; even if retailers can now acquire new GPUs at prices close to MSRP, they still have to offset the higher price they paid to distributors on previously ordered graphics cards. This leads to price averaging between new, lower-priced stock and older, higher-priced stock: resellers increase their margins on cheaper GPUs they've recently acquired so as to be able to reduce pricing for existing supply. This means that any pricing reduction at a distributor level will take a while to propagate - which brings us to the current price stagnation.
The second-hand market, however, seems to source its stock mostly from miners who are attempting to flee crashing cryptocurrency prices and Ethereum's protocol updates - or from scalpers. None of these have any incentive to reduce their pricing other than lack of sales; and in the current downtrend market, they'll use reseller prices as the baseline for their asking price. As such, and all things considered, the pricing downtrend stagnation likely signals a longer term return to normalcy.