Nvidia RTX 4090 pricing is too damn high, while most other GPUs have held steady or declined in past 6 months — market analysis

Finding the right graphics card for your PC involves research, along with an assessment of the things you need, not to mention your finances. We've been checking retail prices in the U.S. monthly, on all of the latest graphics cards, and we decided to take a closer look at the trends as 2023 winds down. Many of these rank among the best graphics cards, including the Nvidia RTX 40-series, AMD RX 7000-series, and Intel Arc GPUs.

Prices do fluctuate quite a bit within a month — for example, during November's Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness, we saw prices on many of these GPUs drop by up to 20%. Except, some of those "drops" were relative to pre-inflated prices from the start of November. That's just one of the many things that show up in our charts. The other major highlight is just how much RTX 4090 prices have increased in the past few months. Overall, though, we see surprising consistency in pricing on most models since June, with just a few wild swings up or down.

We have pricing tables alongside the charts below with U.S. prices as of December 1, 2023, though if you want up-to-date pricing, check our GPU price index. We've dropped Nvidia's RTX 30-series from the list, as it's mostly discontinued now (other than 3050/3060 cards). And again, note that these are retail prices for new graphics cards — we've eliminated refurbished, used, and open-box listings from consideration.

Most of the RTX 40-series pricing has been relatively static, perhaps with a very slight downward trend. The major exception is the RTX 4090, which has shot up from a low of around $1,550 back in June, to over $2,000 at present. The primary cause appears to be the U.S. export restrictions on the RTX 4090, which has caused some people to begin hoarding RTX 4090 cards — which they'll have to try to sneak into China, most likely.

This, in turn, appears to have had a slight knock-on effect where the RTX 4080 prices have increased around 10% since early November, though we did at least see some decent sales on that GPU during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday timeframe. There's also the rumored impending launch of the RTX 4080 Super, which will likely replace the vanilla 4080. So clearing out "old" inventory before that launch (likely in January) makes sense.

The RTX 4070 Ti and below are all basically flat in terms of price trends, though the 4070 Ti has dropped a bit from its $799 launch price, and the same goes for the RTX 4060 Ti. Those both had... well, let's just call them overly ambitious prices on the part of Nvidia. The Black Friday deals on several of those brought them down to where we really feel they should have stayed, but we'll have to see where the various rumored RTX 40-series Super models land. RTX 4060 has dropped $10 from its launch MSRP, with a few minor fluctuations — though note that, as with all of the least expensive GPUs, sometimes the cheapest models have worse cooling and noise characteristics.

AMD's RX 7000-series has been a bit sporadic of late, particularly on the top RTX 7900 XTX and RTX 7900 XT models. Those hit their best relative lows in October, but again we saw some good deals near the end of last month. There are rumors the RX 7900 XTX could start to see higher prices, due to the RTX 4090 shenanigans mentioned above, though so far it's at least staying below its launch MSRP. The 7900 XT meanwhile saw an upward blip at the start of November, before falling back to roughly the same price as in October — likely an attempt to make those BF/CM "deals" look more enticing.

The RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT have seen very little movement since they launched in mid-July. As noted at the time, the 7800 XT was the more desirable card, and with only a $50 price premium, most people should look to that GPU. This is probably why the 7700 XT has dropped $20. RX 7600 meanwhile shows the same minor blip at the start of November, but has generally been selling in the $240–$250 range.

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We've split the AMD RX 6000-series into two charts, as there are so many of them available. Obviously, availability of the RX 6950 XT and RX 6900 XT has become far less predictable, and we suspect most of those were sold off during BF/CM this past month — one final hurrah for the highest performance RDNA 2 GPUs. Just in time, too, as there's not much reason to pay more for one of those GPUs when the RX 7800 XT delivers similar performance alongside some new features.

Nearly everything below the top two models has been on a steady downward trend, basically going back to last year's RDNA 3 launches. The only exception is the RX 6700 10GB, which was never widely available and now seems to be largely out of stock — Newegg no longer lists any cards, and prices are flat since last month, after increasing from August through November.

The RX 6600-class and below also saw a jump in prices between June and July, and in many cases we haven't quite matched the previous low.

Intel's Arc GPUs had some of the best deals during Black Friday, but now they're back to "normal." The Arc A750 remains an impressive deal, currently matching the newer (and slower) Arc A580 on price. The A770 8GB seems to be largely out of stock, or at least prices increased a lot since October's low of $239 — and it was briefly on sale for $199 for Black Friday. Now it costs as much as the more desirable A770 16GB, and it's hard to justify the existence of the A770 8GB when the A750 and A580 overlap it in so many ways.

As for the bottom-tier A380 (we haven't tracked the A310), we've routinely seen it selling at $100, including during much of November. But now the cheapest models are back to $120. If you're still thinking about picking up an A380, we suggest waiting for the next sale to drop it below $100. There's not much point in spending more than that when the sales are so frequent.