Something to look forward to: Gamers who were once forced to beg and sell vital organs if they wanted a graphics card are now facing a situation where they’re almost spoilt for choice—and things could get even better. According to new reports, Nvidia is working with board partners to reduce the price of its cards even further this month as the arrival of the RTX 4000 series, aka Ada Lovelace, draws ever closer.
The current graphics card market is a total contrast to the shambolic state that gamers had to endure since Ampere launched almost two years ago. The chip crisis and unprecedented demand from both gamers and miners combined to push up selling prices, which at one point were 200% above MSRP.
Things have changed drastically over the last couple of months, of course, helped in no small measure by the crypto crash. With Lovelace expected to arrive in September or October, Nvidia is dropping prices as it tries to clear out an excess of GPU stock, a problem that’s especially apparent in higher-end models such as the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. Cards have now fallen below MSRP in many countries, and their prices keep on dropping.
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According to reports from two Chinese sources (via VideoCardz), Nvidia will be working with partners to further reduce the prices of their graphics cards. Zol writes that the company is taking “aggressive actions” to cut prices at the end of August, and it wants the discounts to be deeper than AMD’s, which is expected to take similar actions.
Once again, the RTX 3090 and 3090 Ti are said to be receiving some of the biggest price drops; Nvidia previously knocked $400 off the latter card’s $1,999 MSRP (Founders Edition). That makes sense as team green is thought to have so many excess GPUs that it is restarting production of the RTX 3080 12GB. The card, which Nvidia stopped producing as it tried to shift more 10GB variants, sports defective GA102 GPUs unsuitable for use in the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090s.
With AMD also set to drop the prices of its cards, gamers are now facing the dilemma of whether to buy now, wait for the current generation to get even cheaper, or splash out on an RTX 4000/Radeon RX 7000 card when they arrive. Given that the RTX 4070’s performance is said to match the RTX 3090 Ti, it’s not an easy decision to make.