It costs significantly more to get products into the United States now. International shipping between Asia and North America has been an absolute mess. Supply and demand aren’t the only factors affected by the pandemic. Shipping containers leave a port via railroad. Workers in overseas factories tend to take a week or more off for the holiday, which is good for them, but doesn’t help with the supply side of this ongoing shortage. “Most people don’t know Chinese New Year happened in February,” Herkelman said. Because of that shortage, we are seeing price hikes.” Sadly, Nvidia now says it expects demand to exceed supply for GeForce GPUs throughout 2021.Ĭultural events also play a small role. There was a quarter-over-quarter decrease in shipments. Asus, one of the biggest PC component vendors in the world, just told investors that “The most pressing issue for GPUs right now is the shortage of Nvidia’s GPUs. We continue to work during the quarter on our supply and we believe…that demand will probably exceed supply in Q4 for overall gaming,” Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress said during a call with investors last November.Īnd it’s seemingly getting worse. “Past what we’re seeing in terms of wafers and silicon…some constraints are in substrates and components. The company also plans on launching mobile Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs for laptops soon, too. On the AMD side of things, the company launched not only the Radeon RX 6000-series last fall, but also the best-in-class Ryzen 5000 desktop and laptop processors and those next-gen consoles, which both feature AMD chips that marry Ryzen and Radeon on a single die. AMDĪMD CEO Lisa Su holding a rare RDNA 2 graphics chip. Supply woesĮven though both Nvidia and AMD have said they’ve been shipping as many or more graphics cards than in prior launches, it still hasn’t been enough to keep up with the overwhelming demand, for a few different reasons. Lots of people-even ones who weren’t gamers before. PC gaming boomed during the pandemic, with Steam setting fresh concurrent user milestones seemingly every other week. Nintendo Switch supply became much more available as time wore on, but when the new graphics cards and next-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles released last fall, they also suffered from overwhelming demand, (and still do). Steam served up 25.2 exabytes (or 25.2 million 1 terabyte hard drives) of data in 2020. The card is currently going for over $1,000 on Ebay. Most people have had more success claiming a vaccine shot than a new GPU this year, unbelievably enough. When the Nitro+ 6700 XT actually hit the streets at Newegg, however, it cost a whopping $730 and still sold out in no time. Sapphire said it would charge $580-an additional $100 premium-for its fantastic, custom-designed Nitro+ variant. We said that in a sane GPU market, the price was about $100 too high for the performance offered. AMD’s Radeon RX 6700 XT launched at $480 in mid-March. Many of those cards reappear shortly thereafter on resale sites like Ebay and Craiglist for twice their suggested price, or more. New graphics card stock drops disappear in minutes, if not seconds, at online retailers, often at crazily high prices. Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 30-series and AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards blaze new performance trails compared to last generation’s disappointing offerings-but most people have no chance of getting their hands on either, especially not at a sane price. Nvidia's power-hungry RTX 4000-series GPUs are also reportedly coming this year, as are AMD's RDNA 3-powered Radeon 7000-series cards.Īnd the launch of new GPUs brings with it a bunch of new questions: Will the MSRPs for new cards go up because people are so used to paying more for GPUs? Will current-generation models stick around at lower prices or gradually fade to drive consumers to the newer products? Will consumers still be interested in buying "last-gen" cards or will they decide to hold out for newer models instead? GPU prices may be going down, but we can expect them to remain unpredictable for the foreseeable future.It’s a bleak time to be a PC gamer. Intel has already gone on the record about its dedicated Arc GPUs, which are due to arrive this summer. Shortages or not, the technology powering these GPUs is still marching on in the background-all three of the major GPU companies are said to be planning GPU launches sometime this year. Further Reading Intel’s long-awaited Arc GPUs begin shipping today, starting in laptops
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