Nvidia and AMD GPUs return to the shelves and prices are finally falling

For nearly two years, it’s been a matter of luck (or a lot of skill) to buy a PS5, Xbox Series X, or AMD Radeon and Nvidia RTX graphics card without paying a fortune. At peak scalpers successfully charged double or even triple List price for a modern GPU. But it looks like the major GPU shortage is almost over.

In January, sites including Tom’s Hardware reported that prices had finally begun to fall, and they did; they have now fallen 30 percent on average in the three months since. On eBay, the most popular graphics cards only have a street price of $200-$300 above the MSRP. And while that may seem like a lot, some have dropped further: used Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti or AMD RX 6900 XT currently fetch less than their original asking price, a sure sign that common sense is returning to the market.

Just as importantly, some graphics cards actually stay in stock at retailers when their prices are too high – again, something that sounds perfectly normal but we haven’t seen in a while. For many months, boutiques like my local retailer Central Computers could only afford to sell you a GPU as part of a large PC bundle, but now it makes each card available individually. GameStop is selling a Radeon RX 6600 for just $10 above its suggested retail price, and it hasn’t sold out yet. Newegg has also consistently offered an RTX 3080 Ti for just $10 above the MSRP (even after discount) — even if $1,200 still seems high for that card’s level of performance.

If you’re willing to pay a markup, there are plenty more: a quick scan shows me the price floor of an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti has fallen to about $580, 3070 Ti to $700, and 3080 to about $1,000 in retail, with some retailers boasting of an “instant savings” or “instant discount” rather than lowering their prices across the board. Some, like Asus, say they are passing savings on to customers now that a Trump-era tariff on GPUs has expired. In Germany, retail prices have fallen to just 12 to 19 percent above the suggested retail price, according to 3DCenter, which has been tracking those prices longer than anyone else.

“Right now you can have a card from any SKU at prices people would have jumped for three months ago,” says Falcodrin, the full-time GPU hunter I interviewed last December. And Falcodrin is pretty sure that prices will continue to fall – because even as supply starts to catch up, demand has fallen.

“Everyone doesn’t want to pay now. Some of that is probably they just got their cards, some of that is probably tax season, and some of that is that consumer confidence in the US is as low as it has been since 2008,” Falcodrin tells WebMD. The edgewhile admitting that his own business has been tough as cryptocurrency miners close shop and inflation continues to climb.

So if Nvidia and AMD’s partners want to sell their stock of GPUs, they may soon be able to compete with each other to cut prices again.

With many prices still $200 above MSRP, we’re not out of the woods yet, but no one is selling GPUs or consoles for double or triple what they’re worth anymore. On eBay, just two graphics cards—the RTX 3070 and 3060 Ti—sell over 1.5 times their MSRP on average. Another encouraging sign is that the number GPUs that changed hands in a week have fallen by more than half since March, making them much less attractive to scalpers.

One thing that might surprise you is that Sony’s PlayStation 5 is still holding its value on eBay, averaging $703 for the disk drive model, about the same as we saw in January and still 1.4 times the MSRP. That, although the street price of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X fell 20 percent to $547 (just $48 above MSRP) over the same period. The Xbox Series S, meanwhile, is no longer a scalping target at all, as it’s been available for months at the $299 sticker price. Good!

With the rate at which prices and volumes are falling, eBay may not be a valuable price-checking tool for long — which is exactly how we want it to be, because that means sanity has returned.

Then again, there’s a decent chance that Nvidia and AMD will announce new, more expensive cards before that happens, like the rumored RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, and there will always be something else to scalp. The Steam Deck currently fetches over $1,000 on eBay on average in case you were wondering. Pleasure!