Earlier this week, Nvidia announced at its GTC 2022 conference new RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards. These promise to be up to 4 times more powerful than their predecessors, but this increase in performance came with by a significant increase in the prices of the three cards.
Indeed, it takes 899 dollars for the cheapest RTX 4080 12 GB, 1199 dollars for the RTX 4080 16 GB and up to $1599 for the RTX 4090, the most powerful card of the lot. In Europe, the prices are even higher, since the cards are offered at 1099 euros, 1469 euros and 1949 euros, respectively. We are therefore dealing with a considerable increase of 22% at home. These high prices could well become the norm, if we are to believe the CEO of Nvidia himself.
Nvidia’s graphics cards could get more and more expensive
When asked about the remarkably high cost of his company’s new GPUs by Digital Trends, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was very blunt in saying that “ the idea that chips will drop in price is ancient history “.
With cryptocurrency mining waning after Ethereum’s ‘The Merge’ merger, many PC enthusiasts had hoped that graphics cards, which have until recently been sparsely available and very expensive, would see a return to more reasonable prices in the future. It seems, however, that Nvidia disagrees.
Indeed, the CEO announces that Moore’s law is no longer relevant. As a reminder, this is a phenomenon of the transistors doubling every two years, which is supposed to increase performance while reducing costs. The problem is that today making chips is getting more and more expensive.
GPU prices are therefore unfortunately not ready to drop in the coming months., contrary to what we might have expected. It could also be that the next generations of graphics cards will become more and more expensive to produce.