There’s a looming GPU supply crisis, which means prices are likely to get a whole lot worse. And it’s not just because of memory
(Image credit: Future) A couple weeks back I noted that I'd been tracking GPU prices on an almost weekly basis for a year now, and that things have never been worse. Well, PC Partner—one of the biggest manuf...
A couple weeks back I noted that I'd been tracking GPU prices on an almost weekly basis for a year now, and that things have never been worse. Well, PC Partner—one of the biggest manufacturers of graphics cards you've probably never heard of—suggests it's going to get even worse. And probably quickly.
PC Partner makes a ton of graphics cards for its consumer facing brands Zotac, Inno3D, and Manli. I've visited one of its main factories in Dongguan, China, and it's production lines are big. So when Singaporean outlet, The Straits Times, notes the company as saying that the supply of graphics cards is going to get real tight in the coming months it's worth listening.
And the worst part about it is that apparently it's going to be the entry level cards that will be the most adversely affected. With severe shortages comes increased prices, and while Nvidia cards with VRAM capacities of 8 GB haven't had the spiking price tags of their more heavily memory'd cousins, it looks like it won't be long before they do.
Benchlife, reporting on the PC Partner announcement, has itself confirmed that supply of Nvidia's RTX Blackwell GPUs in the third quarter of this year is below the second quarter, and that supply at the end of the year will be even lower than that. It also notes that this isn't purely down to the constrained supply of GPUs and memory owing to the demands of the data centre elites, but that other parts of the graphics card manufacturing process—such as PCBs and power componentry—are also suffering from long lead times compared with last year.
Given that Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB and RTX 5070 graphics cards are both now batting around the $800 mark, it's mighty concerning that the more affordable end of the GPU spectrum look set to get slammed with higher prices, too. The doom disciple in me fears for a world where an RTX 5050 costs $500.
Though it can only cost $500 if someone is willing to pay that and surely, surely no-one would. Would they?
We manually tracked GPU prices for a year… it's bad - YouTube
But it's not just going to be Nvidia cards though. It has been GeForce GPUs which have been affected more by the most recent price spike (though RX 9000 series cards have also had their fair share of price increases immediately after launch), but PC Partner is also the contract manufacturer of Sapphire GPUs, one of AMD's biggest graphics card makers, so I don't doubt it was talking to those cards, too. Especially if part of the supply constraints are around other components all GPUs need to live.
And if AMD cards get priced out of the reach of us mere PC gaming mortals, then there will be no alternatives for us.
Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.