Graphics card pricing is a lie

Both Nvidia and AMD are announcing prices for new GPUs that customers have essentially zero chance of actually paying.

- MICHAEL CRIDER

Okay, it's time to stop pretending that the “retail price” of a graphics card means anything at all. AMD made a big press splash (fave.co/43lbWxO) about launching its new Radeon RX 9070 cards at $550 and $600, sliding in well under Nvidia's pricing for the same performance level. Surprise, surprise—it's essentially impossible to find a new card at that price on launch day. It is, for all practical purposes, a lie.

Without any real intent to pull the “complete order” trigger, I looked around for a $600 Radeon RX 9070 XT (fave.co/423Cx7k) card this morning. Initial reports from retailers indicated that there were a lot more AMD cards available than there were for the recently launched RTX 50-series, for which Nvidia seems to have completely abandoned any pretense of delivering chips to PC gamers. But for the fourth time this year (fave.co/3FtguhG), the cards were snapped up more or less instantly at 9 a.m. sharp.

A FAMILIAR PROBLEM

While it's true that there are more Radeon 9070 cards around than GeForce RTX 50-series cards, the only ones left at 9:05 a.m. were showing markups of $150 or more on that oh-so-tantalizing $600 manufacturer's suggested retail price. And without any cards sold with AMD-only branding, like Nvidia's much-sought-after Founder's Edition cards that actually are at the announced price, the markup is now basically the starting price.