AMD vs Nvidia GPU price war is about to get nasty (and that’s good news for us)
Aggressive price cuts are just around the corner for graphics cards, apparently
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Nvidia’s RTX 3000graphics cardsmay see further price reductions as August rumbles onwards, or that’s the latest gossip from the grapevine.
AsVideoCardznoticed, this theory was aired by a Chinese source (ZOL, viaMyDrivers), and the belief is that Nvidia’s price cutting is going to continue – and indeed that in a couple of weeks, we’ll witness deeper discounts to shift Ampere stock.
The story at ZOL – add your own skepticism to all this, liberally – is that price cuts will get “more aggressive” at the end of August, and not just for Nvidia, but alsoAMD. The claim is that Team Green will make larger price cuts than AMD in an attempt to further stoke RTX 3000 sales to a greater extent than RX 6000 (Nvidia’s GPUsare already a lot more popular anyway, mind you, in the current climate).
It isn’t clear exactly which models Nvidia could reduce asking prices for, but we can count on higher-end GPUs being driven down in price, as has already happened – just look at thewhopping discount recently witnessed on the flagship RTX 3090 Ti, for example.
The hope is that pricing will be eased for more affordable Ampere graphics cards, too, such as theRTX 3060and 3070; meaningful price cuts in this range could mean some serious bargains could be there for the taking (finally).
Analysis: Wait and see is our advice (again)
While we have to be careful about the source here – more so than the usual nuggets from the rumor mill – we’re slightly more willing to allow some further benefit of the doubt given that this obviously aligns with what’s already been happening, and what’s widely predicted for Nvidia GPU pricing in the near future.
It’d hardly be any surprise given the consistent rumors which have been coming through regardingNvidia’s excess stock of RTX 3000 graphics cards, and having to balance helping partners clear that inventory with deciding on the timeframe for the next-gen GPU launch (push out RTX 4000 too quickly, and that’ll further depress sales which are already problematic,as we’ve seen, due to the crypto crash and cost of living crisis).
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What’s particularly interesting here is the prospect of AMD engaging in similar price cutting, and that this could become a battle of discounting to sell off current-gen products ahead of the launch of their successors.
We were already advising folks to wait for bigger price drops to come through from Nvidia, anyway, and this chatter from the grapevine just underlines that even more firmly. It’s certainly worth holding out for a few weeks to see where price movements go with Nvidia’s graphics cards – and indeedAMD’s– and find out how much truth there is to rumors of larger drops. Because after all, what have you got to lose, really, by not buying right now, and just waiting a little while? Not much, we’d suggest, while you could have a lot to gain in terms of potential savings.
There’s also the possibility that with this kind of speculation making itself consistently felt in the GPU world, more pronounced price drops will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as more folks wait, and there’s a greater need to stimulate flagging sales as a result.
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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