Now is the time to look for a cheap graphics card

If you’ve been looking for computer upgrades, it’s been a rough Couple of years. After the one-two-three blow of a global chip shortage, a cryptocurrency mining boom, and a scourge of resellers (yes, “scourge” is the collective noun for reseller, I looked it up!), graphics cards in particular have been incredibly hard to find at any kind of reasonable price. But with new budget GPUs on the way from Nvidia and AMD, your best chance of getting a new card for less than a mortgage payment could come very soon.

A bit of context. During CES in early January, Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 3050 and AMD announced the Radeon RX 6500 XT, with retail prices of $250 and $200, respectively. We could go into a lot of detail about the respective technical power of these cards, but that’s another article. Suffice to say, they’re designed with budget gaming PCs in mind, with decent 1080p performance and bringing some high-end features like ray tracing and DLSS at a price they’ve never been available before.

So what’s so different about these cards that will make them less susceptible to market forces that have driven prices to double and even triple their MSRP? A few things. First, they are less powerful cards overall, especially in terms of memory, which means they will be less desirable to cryptocurrency miners. The same number-crunching power that gets you a solid 60 frames per second in 4K also lets you punch through crypto hashes. In short: more power means more money, and crypto miners would rather spend a few hundred dollars on a more powerful card that is more efficient for their purposes. Less demand from crypto miners means less interest from scalpers – trickle-down disinterest, so to speak.

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Hopefully, that will result in less demand from the non-gaming segment of the market. What about the supply? Without getting too technical, less powerful processors can be made in larger batches than the kind of screaming GPUs seen in the RTX 3070, RX 6700 XT and above. The dies that processors create are physically smaller, allowing the manufacturer to get more out of a single run, kind of like making more cookies from the same dough by making each cookie smaller.

This means that chip shortages or not, Nvidia and AMD should be able to get these less powerful cards out of manufacturing plants at a much higher rate. We’re already seeing at least a little evidence of that: Rumors indicate that there is a full version of the RTX 3050 variants coming from various Nvidia manufacturing partners, such as EVGA, MSI, and Asus.

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Of course, with the way things are going, it’s unlikely you’ll get a new graphics card just by wandering into Best Buy on your lunch break. Gamers will likely still have to resort to pre-ordering, waiting in line in front of stores, spamming the F5 button at their favorite retailer, and all the other tedious minutiae of trying to get the fastest gaming PC in the age COVID. (By the way, opting for a pre-built PC might be a better option, at least if you need to upgrade multiple components at once.)

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is scheduled to land on January 19 and the GeForce RTX 3050 is scheduled to launch on January 27. Good hunting.