Graphics Card Prices Dropped by 15% on Average in May

Availability and pricing on the best graphics cards continue to improve, with over half of the current generation AMD and Nvidia GPUs now selling at or below MSRP. We've been tracking GPU prices on eBay for over a year now, as that used to be the best place to find cards that were actually in stock, but that's no longer the case. Amazon, Newegg, and other online retailers routinely have inventory available, sometimes for less than you'd typically pay on eBay. You can also get a new card rather than a potentially used model that might have been mined hard for the past two years.

We've pulled all the data into one place here, looking at the best price we can find for the past several generations of GPUs. That's eBay for anything outside of the RTX 30-series, RX 7000-series, and some of the GTX 16-series cards as well. We'll then rank the cards by bang for the buck (FPS per dollar spent) using 1080p ultra performance data from our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Of course, that doesn't mean you should go out and buy an old GPU, but it's interesting to see just how well some of the cards hold up even in modern games.

The links in the first column are for either eBay or Amazon, though for current-gen graphics cards, you'll want to check Newegg and other retailers as well. Cards that deliver modest performance with a low price rank higher than most newer models, but pay attention to the actual performance on tap and the age of the graphics card. The R9 Fury X sits in second place, but it no longer has active driver support, while the top-ranked GTX 780 is an older card that can't actually run certain modern games (like Far Cry 6).

The best reasonably recent option goes to AMD's RX 6600, which currently can be had for as little as $290 — $40 below the official MSRP. Typical performance is similar to the GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2060 Super, and RX 5700, depending on the games you're playing. The card also only needs about 140W, depending on the particular model.

AMD's RX 6600 XT, RX 6650 XT, RX 6700 XT, and RX 6750 XT all score pretty high in overall value, while the best values for a GeForce RTX card belong to the previous generation RTX 2060, 2070, 2070 Super, and RTX 2080. If you're looking for the best value on an RTX 30-series GPU, the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti land halfway down the table.

Again, older GPUs aren't necessarily the way to go, and raw performance can be more important than a more nebulous value ranking. Buying a cheap GTX 1060 3GB for $125 will suffice for lighter gaming and internet surfing, but if you want 60 fps gaming at 1080p ultra, you'll want a card at least as fast as an RX 5700 or RTX 2060 Super — which brings us back to the RX 6600 and 6600 XT mentioned a moment ago, as those typically offer better performance at a lower price.

Here's the same information, but restricted to only the 20 latest generation GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. AMD's value proposition becomes far more obvious with this view, where the mid-range to high-end RX 6000-series GPUs take the top six spots. You can also get playable performance at 1440p with nearly all of these graphics cards, the sole exception being the RX 6500 XT.

For Nvidia, despite still having somewhat large markups over the official MSRPs, the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti are relatively competitive with AMD's GPUs — especially if we factor in ray tracing performance and DLSS (which the performance numbers don't do for this table). Still, the best value AMD GPUs are at 0.20–0.23 FPS/$, whereas Nvidia's GPUs are at 0.175 FPS/$. As you'd expect, the extreme performance cards populate the bottom of the table, with the RTX 3090 Ti offering less than half the FPS/$ of most of the other graphics cards. In fact, the only GPU in our complete list above that represents a worse value is the Titan RTX.

Taking in the big picture, graphics card prices dropped another 15% on average compared to the previous month. For AMD, only the RX 6800 XT and 6800 cost more than their official MSRPs of $650 and $580, respectively. Conversely, most Nvidia RTX 30-series GPUs still sell for more than the MSRP. The extreme prices on the 3080 12GB and above mean those cards aren't marked up as much, but the RTX 3050 through RTX 3080 10GB are marked up by 20% on average.

That's a lot better than the double or triple MSRPs that we saw last year, and we're heading in the right direction, so hopefully in the next few months we'll see all of the cards selling at or below their MSRPs. And then we'll start seeing the next-gen graphics cards, and the cycle can start all over again — just without cryptominers getting involved.