Technology

Reasons for Graphics Card’s High Prices

Reasons for Graphics Card’s High Prices

Global Chip Storage: Why is a GPU so expensive? How affordable or accessible services depend on supply, demand, and resource allocation, particularly in terms of how much the general public sees and has access to. Globally, there is currently a chip shortage that may last forever. Semiconductor chips are used in everything from computers to airplanes. Manufacturers all around the world were forced to reduce and stop output as a result of the shortage. The chip shortage affects many different goods in addition to graphics cards, such as phones, laptops, and game consoles.

Crypto miners: An excellent graphics card and the right software are necessary for mining cryptocurrencies like ETH. They usually have extremely high requirements for all the graphics cards they need for their systems; as mining is a speedy process, higher-end cards are preferable.

Crypto-miners
Reasons for Graphics Card’s High Prices

Despite the fact that miners held off on buying graphics cards in 2022 due to the bear crypto sector, things could change at any time. Bullish markets frequently result in miners buying numerous graphics cards, thus distorting supply and demand.

The best cryptocurrency miners are typically well-educated, well-connected, and financially stable enough to buy graphics cards and secure the top spots before competitors can enter the market. Fortunately, NVIDIA has found a solution to this problem with its LHR graphics cards, which reduce the cost of mining by 50% and are therefore horrible for miners.

Better specs and performance: Comparing these GPUs to those from the early 2010s, you can see that they use more complex materials and designs. These are easier to create and of higher quality when compared to older versions. This is mostly caused by rising manufacturing costs, one of the key factors driving up the price of a modern GPU. Only what the makers can afford to produce can be produced. Due to rising production costs, manufacturers nowadays must come up with creative ways to boost profits without sacrificing the quality or perhaps quantity of the items.

The current generation of graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA pushes the boundaries of computer graphics in more ways than just frame rates. These GPUs have cutting-edge features like ray tracing and FSR that let you experience at your peak level and at higher resolutions like 4K and QHD.

Not enough competitors: The rising GPU prices are mostly a result of AMD’s lack of competition in the middle of the 2010s and the beginning of the 2020s. Because AMD’s RX 300 GPUs had been putting pressure on it, NVIDIA had a strict pricing policy when it debuted its Pascal-based GeForce 10 series graphics cards in 2016.

The RX Vega launch, which came after this launch, caused AMD to collapse in 2017 since it lacked GPUs that could compete with NVIDIA’s flagship 1080 Ti. Due to this lack of competition, NVIDIA decided to produce the GTX 2080 Ti in 2018 and sell it for US $1,299, which is a significant discount from the price of its predecessor. AMD focused on mid-range graphics cards rather than having any cards to compete with the top-tier cards.