GPU Prices Are Still Twice As Expensive As They Were in 2020

(Credit: Nvidia)If you wiled away your time playing games during the height of the pandemic, you probably remember how expensive gaming hardware was. Video cards were particularly overpriced thanks to crypto mining, but falling prices and Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake have helped to bring prices back to Earth. However, GPUs are still more expensive than they used to be — twice as expensive, according to one German retailer.

Mindfactory.de is a major European PC hardware retailer that occasionally releases sales data for the internet to chew on. It has helped reveal trends like AMD’s market share gains, the popularity of the RTX 4070 Ti, and the failure rates of GPUs. Now, Mindfactory has aggregated recent GPU prices to show that even after the worst of the supply issues, the hardware is still about twice as expensive as it was in 2020.

In 2020, before the massive price run-up, the average price for AMD video cards on Mindfactory.de was €295 ($314), and for Nvidia, it was €427 ($455). Skip the pandemic panic buying, and we come out the other side with current prices of €600 ($639) for AMD and €825 ($879) for Nvidia. That’s just over double the price for both brands.

These prices include all GPUs, even the new RTX 40 series. So, it’s not a shock that the prices are higher, with some of these cards starting at barely under $2,000 — no scalpers necessary. That might sound like a deal compared with spending $3,000 for an RTX 3090 in 2022, but this is Nvidia’s official pricing. Nvidia and AMD seem anxious to reset expectations to maintain some of the inflated profit margins they enjoyed during the height of the shortage. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has publicly warned that the era of falling GPU prices is over, and apparently, Nvidia’s “take it or leave it” attitude about higher partner pricing contributed to EVGA leaving the GPU market entirely.

The consistently higher pricing for current-gen video cards makes PC gaming a harder sell. You can get an Xbox Series S that runs many of the same games on a PC for under $300. That wouldn’t even buy you a midrange GPU right now, and that’s before you add all the other components like a CPU, RAM, and storage. Thankfully (and suspiciously), these components have not experienced a similar doubling of MSRP.

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