According to Jon Peddie, founder and CEO of Jon Peddie Research, an authoritative research organization for the GPU graphics card industry, AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards may plummet over time as scalpers and price hype people find it increasingly difficult to sell goods, especially Gamers refuse to buy at high prices.
Since the Ethereum mining boom, the average selling price of graphics cards has continued to grow exponentially.
When miners started hoarding graphics cards, it led to shortages and price increases, but the situation was made worse by the pandemic.
The inventory of graphics cards in the market is depleted, so scalpers and hype people take advantage of this situation, use robot programs to snap up graphics cards, and sell them at auction sites at higher prices.
Peddie data shows that high demand and mining lead to high prices. The most significant growth in the average selling price of graphics cards occurred in 2019-2020. The first case of Wuhan pneumonia occurred in China in December 2019, after which graphics card prices began to skyrocket.
Crypto Miners are the main reason
Comparing the average selling price of graphics cards in 2019 was a little over $400, but in 2020 it almost reached $700, an increase of about 75%.
At that time, the price of PC game and mining graphics cards was 2~3 times higher than that of mobile graphics cards, which showed that the hype of miners and scalpers was the culprit behind the skyrocketing graphics card prices.
However, the graphics card suppliers did not benefit. On the contrary, the retailers (Amazon, Best Buy, etc.) and scalpers made substantial profits.
However, the price increase of NVIDIA graphics cards is higher than that of AMD products, such as GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and GeForce RTX 3080, which are 91% and 75% higher than the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Players think that the GeForce RTX 3050 of mainstream Ampere products, the actual retail price is higher than the suggested retail price. 40% higher price.
On the AMD side, the flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT rose by up to 30%. Although the performance of the Radeon RX 6600 was slightly higher than that of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, the increase was only 15%.
Jon Peddie emphasized that if the graphics card is not urgently needed, it is recommended to wait for a while. Although the graphics card has not yet dropped to the suggested retail price, it roughly reaches the suggested retail price range.
The auction site’s graphics card price tracker shows that prices are falling, with a 9% drop observed in the first half of March in particular. Peddie believes that previously high prices will begin to plummet when retailers and hype traders such as scalpers have too much inventory to sell.
The market also agrees with this view, but it does not know the starting point of the plunge, and needs to be patient.
(Source of first image: NVIDIA)
