As if the costs of NVIDIA and AMD’s latest graphics cards aren’t disturbing enough (thank tariffs, scalpers, and alleged component shortages), Chinese website MyDrivers has published a bleak rumor suggesting that the prices of GeForce RTX 30 Series and Radeon RX 6000 Series GPUs are about to get even worse. Apparently, memory prices have increased to such an extent that enthusiasts should expect another demoralizing bump to GPU pricing sometime after Chinese New Year.
“This time, it is video memory, whether it is GDDR5 or GDDR6 series, which will also be affected by the whole DRAM industry,” Fast Technology’s Xian Rui wrote (machine translation). “As the price of memory starts to rise, the price of video memory also rises all the way.”
“Previously, ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, and other companies announced the price increase of graphics cards for […] logistics and other reasons. Now, because of the change of memory price, the price change of the graphics cards they received before Q1 showed the slowest, and it is expected that the second wave of price increase will start after the Spring Festival in February.”
In a separate report, HKEPC revealed that the cost of memory had risen by 30 percent over the last month. The increase stems from the current market’s insatiable demand, which memory giants are having a difficult time keeping up with.
“[…] SAMSUNG, SK Hynix and Micron hold about 95 percent of the world’s memory production capacity, of which South Korea accounts for about 75 percent, which has a great impact on the overall market,” HKEPC noted. “As the price of memory fell sharply in 2019 due to overcapacity, the three major companies began to reduce their investment in memory in 2020, but the demand for memory increased sharply in 2020, which led to a serious shortage of production capacity.”