GPUs are too expensive and too hard to find—here’s the proof

Gamers Nexus investigated prices and availability for all the current graphics cards from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. The results are depressingly predictable.

- BY MICHAEL CRIDER

Graphics card pricing sucks, and if you're looking for any kind of midrange or high-end card, it doesn't resemble those "MSRP" prices announced on the stage in any way. You probably know that already if you've shopped for one this year, but an exhaustive statistical analysis proves it.

The Gamers Nexus team, which is no stranger to deep dives on PC hardware (fave. co/3Tx2ilc), decided to take a good, long look at the current graphics card market. The data they collected in a 20-minute video shows that high-end cards, particularly the RTX 5090 and 5080, and the RX 9070 XT, are consistently sold at 45 to 55 percent above the suggested retail price of the base model—the prices that Nvidia and AMD list.

Even allegedly midrange cards like the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti, and the RX 9070, get boosted by 20 to 27 percent. And that's assuming that you can find these cards at all, as stock tends to disappear immediately.