Ahead of the others, the Chinese market allows us to observe a remarkable drop in the price of graphics cards, of all graphics cards.
In just a few days, AMD on the one hand (with the Radeon RX 7600XT) and NVIDIA on the other (with the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti) are getting ready to make the new generations of graphics cards more accessible. Two generations that were launched at the end of last year, but at prices that make them absolutely impossible to buy for the vast majority of gamers. That said, even the arrival of these two new references will not turn the market upside down with a wave of a magic wand. According to the latest estimates, the price of the new GeForce should be between 400 and 450 euros, while for the Radeon, observers expect a similar price. More than 400 euros for a simple graphics card, that's still very expensive, especially since the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles no longer suffer from the shortage as it had been the case since their release.
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Beyond these official prices that we expect from AMD and NVIDIA, the question that arises is rather that of the prices that we will find in stores. After a long period of scarcity during which MSRPs meant nothing at all, things have changed quite a bit. For the whole of 2020 and 2021, as well as for a good part of 2022, the MSRPs put forward by AMD and NVIDIA were largely exceeded by resellers: some references were more than twice the price recommended by the manufacturers. This situation is obviously linked to the shortage, but is no longer relevant. Firstly, because the production chains and logistics are back in order. Secondly, because the demand for cryptocurrencies has collapsed in the wake of the fall in their prices. Finally, the return of inflation and priorities other than gaming hardware have caused many buyers to delay/cancel their purchases.
China, where a large part of the production factories are located, is in the front line and we can observe a clear drop in the price of graphics cards. A drop that pushes most references far below their MSRP. This is of course the case of the Ampere generation models from NVIDIA or RDNA2 from AMD: the GeForce RTX 3070 is at -26% and the Radeon RX 6900XT literally hits the floor with -47.6% compared to its MSRP. That said, the price collapse also affects the new generation cards with -22.1% on the very recent GeForce RTX 4080 and even -25.7% on the Radeon RX 7900XT. It is interesting to note that barely a month after its launch, the GeForce RTX 4070 is already -12.5%! It remains to be seen whether such shifts will be observed in Europe and to what extent they will affect the launch of the latest models.
