Cheaper graphics cards give me back a piece of normality

Great, graphics cards are finally getting cheaper! They should soon be offered at the suggested retail price. To me, this feels like a departure from the “new normal” and a return to, well, normal normal.

We often say lightly that everything was better in the past. Throughout history, people have had challenges, and if we go back 40, 50 years in history alone, life looked a lot murkier. But if I only look at my own lifetime, I have to say: In view of the pandemic, war and inflation, it really was simply better in the past.

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I’ve been looking forward to the latest game consoles since I was a child, and to the latest graphics cards. At TURN ON, I’m following the development of the light simulation ray tracing, which first found its way to gamers in 2018 with the release of Nvidia’s RTX 2000 graphics cards. Back in 2019, my biggest concern was how gaming would feel with 240 Hertz monitors.

The way to the “new normal”

From 2020 things went downhill: the corona pandemic began, followed by the first lockdown and the collapse of the supply chains. A gamble called “crypto-mining,” popular variants of which require GPUs to mine an unstable currency, also drove up graphics card prices. Most of the corona measures are now also being lifted in Hamburg – but at the same time there is war in Europe again. And almost everything is suddenly noticeably more expensive.

Back to the old normal

Almost everything. Because just like before, I can finally look forward to the latest graphics cards again. Like the price analysis of the colleagues from computer base shows, the first GPUs as of the end of April 2022 are sometimes even offered below the recommended retail price (RRP). Specifically, the entry-level models AMD RX 6500 XT and RX 6600 as well as the high-end graphics card Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti.

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For the other cards, at least the surcharge to be paid has consistently shrunk, and that in a very short time: On March 14, the popular RTX 3070 cost 54 percent more than the RRP, on April 26 it was only 35 percent. Last but not least, we can actually buy the graphics cards today while they were hard to come by a few months ago.

I want my little world back

This gives hope that the next generation of graphics cards in the form of the Nvidia RTX 4000 and the AMD RX 7000 will come onto the market in autumn at the RRP – and then I’ll finally get my hobby back! I know there are bigger and more significant things going on on Earth. But for me it would be nice if my little world could be repaired a bit.