We've been watching GPU prices fall since the start of the year, but the past few weeks suggest things could get a lot worse — for the graphics card manufacturers and GPU vendors, that is — in the near future.
GPU prices dropped 15% in May, and we've seen similar 10–15% drops each month for the past several months. We saw the best graphics cards come back into stock (at retail) as GPU mining profitability has plummeted — and that was before Bitcoin and Ethereum crashed again, dropping Bitcoin from around $30,000 to the low $20,000s and Ethereum from around $1,900 to about $1,100. In the past week, Bitcoin's value dropped over 30%, while Ethereum plunged by more than 40%.
This has happened before — back in 2018, when it resulted in a massive oversupply of many GPU lines. AMD's Polaris GPUs, such as the RX 570 and RX 580, went from being wildly-popular mining GPUs to being cards you could pick up for a song. The low-end RX 560 cost almost as much as the RX 570 4GB, even though the latter offered more than twice the performance. And it's not just retail prices that will threaten sales — used GPUs will start to flood the market as people abandon cryptocurrency mining.
We're already starting to see some of these effects. Remember just a few months ago, when the RTX 3080 couldn't be found for under $1,000? It's now going for less than $650 on eBay, and we've seen listings selling groups of six RTX 3080s for as little as $2,500 — $418 each! With the current profitability of RTX 3080 mining hovering around $0.85 per day (after power costs), even hardcore miners are ready to throw in the towel and see what remaining value they can get out of their cards. Wannabe miners would still be looking at about a year and a half to break even, assuming things don't get continue getting worse.
This might sound like doom and gloom, but it's actually great news for anyone looking to upgrade to a new graphics card! Not that we're suggesting you run out and buy a used graphics card off eBay, but we expect nearly every current generation graphics card will soon be found for less-than-retail prices — maybe far less. Here's a look at the latest GPU prices compared to just two weeks ago. (We'll break things down into retail and eBay tables, to make things more understandable.)
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/graphics-card-prices-update-june-15
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What are we up to now anyways, 3090?
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yah the 4000 series should come out soon enough
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What about the 4010?
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what fricking animal, devoid of all reason, deprived of civilization for years, indulged in madness, rife with pure cold malice, would use that as taxonomic basis for a graphic card series.
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I wonder if that's going to get scalped or stay more readily available
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