At long last, Nvidia and AMD GPU street prices are beginning to drop

We’re not out of the woods yet — not even close — but it looks like the prices of Nvidia and AMD GPU prices may finally be coming down. Tom’s Hardware in the US and 3DCenter.org in Germany have been charting eBay and local retail prices, respectively, and they’re each seeing the same thing: a substantial dip for nearly every new graphics card that Nvidia and AMD make.

Want an Nvidia RTX 3080? Just two months ago, that might have cost you $1,773 on the street — over two and a half times the manufacturer suggested retail price. As we reported in November with our own chart, that was typical of the hottest graphics cards, and Tom’s Hardware shows things got slightly worse in December. But in January, those prices have dipped 11 percent to just under $1,600 on average.

The RTX 3080 isn’t alone: most every other RTX 3000 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 graphics card dipped between around 5 and 10 percent, with the RX 6900 XT being the sole exception whose price went up.

Mind you, Tom’s Hardware also shows the volume of sales went down considerably on eBay, and some cards were barely trading, to begin with: just nine units of the Radeon RX 6800 changed hands in a week. It’s possible prices are coming down because some people are giving up, unwilling to pay scalper fees.

Or, perhaps it has to do with the nosedive that cryptocurrency has taken recently. It’ll be interesting to see if the recent slump drives GPU prices down dramatically since they won’t be nearly as valuable to miners now. Miners will often sell large quantities of graphics cards when they can’t put them to work. This batch of eBay data is from last week, so it doesn’t contain the full impact of crypto quite yet.

But 3DCenter.org shows the dip isn’t just happening when GPUs are sold on the secondhand market, but at German retailers as well:

Between these two reports, it feels like a good omen — even if you’ll still pay more than double MSRP for an RTX 3060 Ti right now.

While we haven’t seen any major indications that supply has caught back up to demand (these GPUs remain incredibly hard to find at anything save exorbitant prices), Nvidia and AMD have been repeatedly signaling that they expect supply to improve in the second half of 2022.

On the console front, the PS5 and Xbox Series X are also seeing their secondhand eBay prices sinking. I ran some eBay numbers for the past three months, and both Sony and Microsoft’s flagship consoles have dropped $100, from an average price of $800 to an average of around $700. Here are the charts, in case you’re curious.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge