Skip to main content

Nvidia says falling GPU prices are ‘a story of the past’

Nvidia has just confirmed what many of us were already suspecting — GPUs are expensive, and Nvidia plans to keep it that way.

During a Q&A session with the media, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang lifted the veil of suspense on RTX 40-Series pricing, and the insights are not what we’ve been hoping to hear.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with an RTX 4090 graphics card.
Nvidia

Nvidia has only just announced the GeForce RTX 4090, RTX 4080 16GB, and RTX 4080 12GB, but not everyone was happy. It’s not the capabilities of these cards that were called into question, but their pricing. The RTX 4090 will arrive with a $1,599 price tag, followed by $1,199 for the RTX 4080 16GB and $899 for the RTX 4080 12GB. These prices are too steep, all things considered, but it now seems that this might be the new normal.

Recommended Videos

“The idea that the chip is going to go down in price is a story of the past.”

During the Q&A session, Jensen Huang was asked about GPU prices. His response was very telling.

“Moore’s Law is dead. […] A 12-inch wafer is a lot more expensive today. The idea that the chip is going to go down in price is a story of the past,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a response to PC World’s Gordon Ung.

Moore’s Law is the idea that there’s a trend between PC performance and price, with roughly double the performance for half the price every two years. Huang cited the rising costs of components and slowing of additional power as driving forces behind high GPU prices.

Instead of Moore’s Law, Huang focused on price points and generational improvement. “The performance of Nvidia’s $899 GPU or $1,599 GPU a year ago, two years ago, at the same price point, our performance with Ada Lovelace is monumentally better. Off the charts better.”

The response seems to echo what many of us have already been suspecting. After the GPU shortage has subsided, Nvidia and its partners were left with an oversupply of graphics cards. Once terribly overpriced, these GPUs are now up for grabs at more reasonable prices, but they’re most likely not selling as quickly as the manufacturers might have hoped.

“The 3080 was, and still is, great value, and it will continue to live on,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in another briefing, noting that it was far from dead.

The introduction of the RTX 40-Series steals the thunder from RTX 30-Series, but Nvidia still wants to sell off these older (but still very good) cards. It makes sense to price the RTX 4090 and the two RTX 4080s so high because this might push more people to buy one of the RTX 30 GPUs instead. Be that as it may, it’s sad to hear a confirmation that the prices will continue following an upward trend.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
Nvidia’s RTX 5080 laptop GPU almost makes the flagship obsolete
Upcoming Nvidia RTX 40-series laptops over a black and green background.

Nvidia makes some of the best graphics cards to be found in laptops, but some of these GPUs might be closer in terms of performance than you'd expect. The laptop version of the RTX 5080 has been benchmarked, and it's shockingly close to the RTX 5090. Are the laptops equipped with the RTX 5090 still worth buying?

Notebookcheck was able to compare the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080 laptop GPUs under ideal circumstances: In two iterations of the same laptop. The cards were both paired with AMD's Ryzen 9 9955HX CPU, which removes a lot of the usual benchmarking discrepancy you'd run into in laptops. When both are installed in similar systems, we can get a good feel of how each card performs without external factors, and that is the case in these benchmarks.

Read more
Laptop GPU names feel like a scam
Gamer playing Overwatch on GIGABYTE G6X gaming laptop from GIGABYTE gaming laptop deals.

Despite the top-tier graphics cards from the past few generations being absolute power hogs, drawing hundreds upon hundreds of watts to deliver what feels like increasingly-modest performance gains, their laptop counterparts have taken enormous leaps in capabilities. AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have made great strides in what onboard graphics and dedicated graphics chips can do with relatively limited power and cooling options.

But even so, mobile GPU naming feels like a scam. The latest example is the flagship Nvidia RTX 50 GPU of this generation, the RTX 5090. On desktop it's about 30% faster than an RTX 4090, but with boatloads more memory, support for the latest multi frame generation technology, and a near-600W TDP to go with it.

Read more
Would you pay less for a defective GPU?
The RTX 5090 sitting on top of the RTX 4080.

The graphics card market is an absolute mess at the moment. Stock issues persist despite Nvidia's early claims that it would solve early issues with the 50-series, and AMD has promised to get its exceedingly popular RX 9000-series GPUs back in stock as soon as possible. That's meant pricing is even more ridiculous than ever, with top cards going for hundreds or even thousands of dollars more than they should, and last-generation options priced just as crazily.

But there are alternatives. Alongside buying older and second-hand cards, there's a new brand of GPU available at discounted prices for anyone willing to take a loss on maximum performance: Defective GPUs.

Read more