NVIDIA’s all-in-board partners have reportedly been notified that prices for memory kits for both older and newer GPUs are inbound. This is a somewhat water-is-wet moment following months of rumors and the obvious ongoing rampocalypse that at some point there’d be a breaking point and memory costs would have to be passed on somewhere. Per Benchlife (via VideoCardz).
“According to information we have received, in addition to the price increase of GDDR7 memory based on the Blackwell GPU architecture, other GeForce products using GDDR6 memory will also see price increases.”
– Benchlife (machine translated)
It’s already been speculated that, aside from customers, the ones who’ll be hardest hit will be small board partners who have less budget to work with and could end up being priced out by larger companies that may buy up inventory in large-volume deals. Regardless, at the end of the line is the consumer who’ll be stuck with the final, high price of a graphics card that likely cost much less compared to its availability a year ago.
“In retrospect, waiting is no longer an advantage; on the contrary, buying early means enjoying the benefits and getting a discount…”
– Benchlife (machine translated)
However, to make matters worse, this will apply to current GDDR7 but also older GDDR6, meaning that the recently revived RTX 30 series, any possible RTX 40 series that could be poised for a comeback, and current RTX 50 series will likely see MSRP increases. The GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB, which uses GDDR6, recently made a miraculous comeback with its original 2022 MSRP, but that price is likely to be short-lived given this news. This news also supports the rumors as to why NVIDIA’s GPU RTX 50 series refresh, aka SUPER, has been absent despite many rumors hinting it could’ve launched months ago. Most recently, some partners have said, per VideoCardz, that they’ve received RTX 50 SUPER GPUs, but they are on hold due to the price of their premium 3G GDDR7 modules.
“According to our source, a 3GB GDDR7 chip currently costs between $60 and $70. A standard 2GB GDDR7 chip reportedly costs around $20. This means the 3GB version can cost about three times as much despite providing 50% more capacity.”
– VideoCardz
The short end of it all is that sooner or later prices are going to go up, but the only good news that could be gleaned from all this is that we may still yet see the RTX 50 SUPER series launch before 2027 or perhaps shortly thereafter.
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