2022 in GPUs: Scarcity Ends, But Higher Prices Seem Here to Stay
2022 in GPUs: Scarcity Ends, But Higher Prices Seem Here to Stay
Expand / Left to right and largest to smaller: GeForce RTX 4080 (which is the same physical size as the RTX 4090), Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT.
Andrew Cunningham
In 2021, the biggest story about GPUs was that most of the time you just couldn't buy them, not without paying inflated scalper prices on eBay or learning how to navigate a maze of stock tracking websites or Discords.< /p>
The good news is that the inventory situation has improved a lot in 2022. A cryptocurrency crash and falling PC sales have reduced demand for GPUs, making them less profitable for PCs. scalpers, which improved the inventory situation. It is currently possible to visit an online store and purchase many GPUs for at least close to their original list price.
We've also seen plenty of new GPU launches in 2022. The year started less than well with the launch of 1080p-focused and inflated price cards like Nvidia's RTX 3050 and mediocre RX AMD 6500XT. But at the end of the year, we received the extremely expensive but extremely powerful RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 cards from Nvidia, the less monstrous but still competitive RX 7900 series from AMD, and the Arc A770 and A750 cards from Intel , defective but price conscious.
The bad news is that the aftermath of the GPU shortage persists, mostly in the form of inflated prices. We can hope these will drop in 2023, but so far there are few signs of that happening.
Budget GPUs are in a sorry state
You can still find GPUs $200 and below if you're looking for basic, better-than-integrated performance in older, low-end games that you'll mostly be running at 1080p or lower.
But performance in this category has very changed little over the last three or four years. Nvidia seems content to serve this low-end slice of the gaming market with the same GeForce GTX 1650 GPU it introduced in 2019, a card that stubbornly continues to hover in the $150-$200 price window despite its age. Both AMD and Intel launched new cards for the sub-$200 market last year, and these cards can sometimes beat the performance of the GTX 1650. But these cards also have flaws that are hard to ignore.
AMD's RX 6500 XT was originally a notebook GPU geared towards desktops, and as a result it supports fewer displays than other RX 6000 series GPUs, it lacks hardware video encoding support and its performance in older PCI Express 3.0-capable PCs are poor because they only provide four lanes of PCIe bandwidth in the first place. Intel's Arc A380 offers excellent video encoding support (including for the AV1 video codec), but like other Arc cards, its drivers are approximate and performance in older games can be spotty.
If superior GPUs like Nvidia's RTX 3050 series and AMD's RX 6600 series soon fall into the $200 and below bracket, we'll feel much better about the state of budget GPUs (the RX 6600 is coming awfully close, with prices falling into the $220-250 range for
Expand / Left to right and largest to smaller: GeForce RTX 4080 (which is the same physical size as the RTX 4090), Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT.
Andrew Cunningham
In 2021, the biggest story about GPUs was that most of the time you just couldn't buy them, not without paying inflated scalper prices on eBay or learning how to navigate a maze of stock tracking websites or Discords.< /p>
The good news is that the inventory situation has improved a lot in 2022. A cryptocurrency crash and falling PC sales have reduced demand for GPUs, making them less profitable for PCs. scalpers, which improved the inventory situation. It is currently possible to visit an online store and purchase many GPUs for at least close to their original list price.
We've also seen plenty of new GPU launches in 2022. The year started less than well with the launch of 1080p-focused and inflated price cards like Nvidia's RTX 3050 and mediocre RX AMD 6500XT. But at the end of the year, we received the extremely expensive but extremely powerful RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 cards from Nvidia, the less monstrous but still competitive RX 7900 series from AMD, and the Arc A770 and A750 cards from Intel , defective but price conscious.
The bad news is that the aftermath of the GPU shortage persists, mostly in the form of inflated prices. We can hope these will drop in 2023, but so far there are few signs of that happening.
Budget GPUs are in a sorry state
You can still find GPUs $200 and below if you're looking for basic, better-than-integrated performance in older, low-end games that you'll mostly be running at 1080p or lower.
But performance in this category has very changed little over the last three or four years. Nvidia seems content to serve this low-end slice of the gaming market with the same GeForce GTX 1650 GPU it introduced in 2019, a card that stubbornly continues to hover in the $150-$200 price window despite its age. Both AMD and Intel launched new cards for the sub-$200 market last year, and these cards can sometimes beat the performance of the GTX 1650. But these cards also have flaws that are hard to ignore.
AMD's RX 6500 XT was originally a notebook GPU geared towards desktops, and as a result it supports fewer displays than other RX 6000 series GPUs, it lacks hardware video encoding support and its performance in older PCI Express 3.0-capable PCs are poor because they only provide four lanes of PCIe bandwidth in the first place. Intel's Arc A380 offers excellent video encoding support (including for the AV1 video codec), but like other Arc cards, its drivers are approximate and performance in older games can be spotty.
If superior GPUs like Nvidia's RTX 3050 series and AMD's RX 6600 series soon fall into the $200 and below bracket, we'll feel much better about the state of budget GPUs (the RX 6600 is coming awfully close, with prices falling into the $220-250 range for
Expand / Left to right and largest to smaller: GeForce RTX 4080 (which is the same physical size as the RTX 4090), Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT.
Andrew Cunningham
