(Credit: PCMag/Michael Kan)
It took only a few months, but the graphics card market has turned from relatively healthy to horrible as the worsening memory shortage has led to price hikes and scant supply.
In September and October, we did price checks at major retailers and noticed that the GPU market had mostly stabilized. In some cases, vendors were even offering attractive discounts.
Unfortunately, the market has once again gone off the rails. The demand for AI data centers has led to a memory crunch that’s been strangling the PC supply chain, including for graphics cards, which was evident in our latest price check.
You can see this in the price increases for Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, which now costs almost $1,000 when it launched at $749. Plus, fewer models are available at retailers, reflecting concerns that the RTX 5070 Ti has been effectively discontinued, although Nvidia denies this. (We've put in parentheses where we found the GPU currently available.)
The RTX 5080 is facing a similar situation, where the GPU costs closer to $1,600 to $1,700, rather than the normal $999 starting price.
As for the RTX 5090, supplies were already slim. But now the top-tier GPU seems to be sold out everywhere. It's why we couldn't find pricing for many of the models. Of those that we could, it was a third-party merchant on Newegg offering the RTX 5090—but at double the normal price.
In one positive sign, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT was easy to find in stock at various retailers. But the product’s pricing has increased by around $80 in many cases. Nvidia's lower-tier RTX 5070 can also be found in stock at normal pricing.
Still, it’s a dire situation for PC builders looking to upgrade or build new desktop systems. In addition, memory supplies might not improve for the next two years, according to Micron, one of the leading memory suppliers.
Recent headlines about the ongoing memory shortage may have also caused some consumers to scramble and buy GPUs, further depleting available stock. And some GPU vendors are reportedly preparing 15% price hikes for higher-tier GPUs with 16GB of video memory.