No more waiting - Why you can probably buy yourself a gpu soon

Praise the gaming gods, the time of scarce graphics cards is finally over! Gamers around the world can breathe a sigh of relief, as a trend in graphics cards that many of you have been eagerly waiting for can be observed: Falling prices.

But that's not all. In the last few weeks, many models approached the manufacturer's MSRP for the first time in years. An effect that is likely to be amplified by the current Bitcoin and Ethereum trends.

We' ve taken a closer look at the current movements and reveal the reasons for the ongoing trend, how the prices of popular models have developed in recent months, and why buying a new graphics card may soon become a reality for many of you. 

The last few years

There's no other way to put it, gpu prices over the last 2 years have been brutal. Even before Covid, Bitcoin miners were giving us gamers a hard time and were driving up the prices of graphics cards.

The Corona pandemic then took the problem to a whole new level. Many countries were on lockdown for extended periods of time and the demand for gaming and gaming equipment increased tremendously. Combined with disrupted supply chains, graphics cards became hotly contested and unaffordable in the months that followed.

As if that wasn't bad enough, this shortage (as always) called in plenty of scalpers who found every graphics card available, bought them, and then resold them for a much higher price. The prices exploded! 

Now, however, it looks like graphics card prices are recovering for the first time in a long period of time. How is that possible?  

The current trend 

Many problems of the manufacturers seem to be partially solved by now. As a result, many graphics cards are slowly coming back into stock, which leads to the first good offers and to falling prices.  

Due to the slight relaxation in retail, the situation on the used market has also improved, which makes life difficult for scalpers.  

These developments have already led to significantly falling prices for graphics cards in the last few months. In the last few days, however, there is an additional effect that can already be observed in many countries around the world.  

Due to the strong drop of Bitcoin and Ethereum, "mining" cryptocurrencies is currently no longer profitable for many miners. The high demand for graphics cards by crypto farms has thus literally vanished overnight and led to an initial flooding of the market with (heavily) used graphics cards. 

But what are the prices actually like at the moment? To get a better feel for the current situation, we took a closer look at the prices of the more popular AMD and Nvidia models.

We can easily see that the prices of both Nvidia and AMD models have dropped significantly. Particularly noticeable are the very expensive Nvidia models RTX 3090, RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3080, which are now up to 47% cheaper compared to January!

AMD graphics cards have never been as overpriced as comparable Nvidia models, but you can still observe strongly decreasing prices in the last few months here as well.  

Important: These numbers are based on average prices of several variants of the relevant models on the price comparison portal Idealo. Although they give a good feeling for the current trend, they are of course not exact data. 

Should we still wait? 

Of course, many of you are wondering if the time is right to buy new GPUs. But before you go on a big shopping spree and eat nothing but noodles for the rest of the month, there are three things you should keep in mind. 

We strongly advise you not to buy used graphics cards from crypto farms. These have been in non-stop use for years, massively overclocked, and therefore probably won't stand out with a particularly long lifespan and a good price-performance ratio. 

Furthermore, every hype is also always the time of scammers. If you see an offer that is too good to be true, then it probably is. Trust your instincts and don't do anything stupid just to squeeze a few more FPS out of your favorite game.

New models are coming in the fall. This could lead to rising prices, but we can generally assume that the current models will become significantly cheaper in the next few months.  

In our opinion, we are quite close to the right time. Those who have wanted to buy a new GPU for a long time should do so soon. Everyone else can wait a bit longer and speculate on falling prices. 

However, those who have been waiting for a very long time and find a model from a reputable vendor that is close to or below the MSRP should grab it now. After all, hard years lie behind all friends of maximum graphics settings!