The battle for next-gen graphics cards between Nvidia and AMD looks set to intensify ahead of the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX next week, as Nvidia is reportedly set to drop the price of its RTX 4080 in mid-December to compete with Team Red’s latest flagship.
The price cut rumor comes from a Twitter leaker harukaze5719 (opens in a new tab)which says that the price of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4080 will be “adjusted” in mid-December and that Nvidia is not doing this in response to AMD’s upcoming launch, but rather in response to “own considerations”, specifically its price-performance ratio, and to help improve sale.
According to boardchannels, the price of the RTX 4080 will be adjusted in mid-December. However, the source emphasizes that the price cuts are not afraid of RDNA3, but of their own thoughts. The price is discounted accordingly to improve the price-performance ratio and stimulate sales. https://t.co/M0bXfHqDZIDecember 5, 2022
This last point is definitely possible as it has been reported that scalpers have had difficulty selling ill-gotten graphics cards as they have done in the past. But there’s no getting around the fact that AMD’s next generation of GPUs is just around the corner, and that it’s significantly lower than Nvidia’s RTX 4080, and rumors of a drop in the RTX 4080’s price are at least visible over time. So what’s going on here?
Nvidia horribly, horribly mispriced the RTX 4080, giving AMD a huge opening
Even with the price drop, Nvidia really botched the launch of the RTX 4080. Not only did it create confusion by initially announcing two RTX 4080 cards, one with 16GB VRAM and one with 12GB, it then “unleashed” the 12GB version which was also the cheaper of the two cards , leaving both next-gen cards north $1,200 (after tax and/or shipping).
Now the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is also playing the manufacturer’s game, claiming “Our flagship card sells for less than $1,000!” charging exactly one penny less and claiming a win of $999.99 but also has the RX 7900 XT for $900 which means at least one its launch cards will sell for less than a thousand dollars, and if the performance of these two cards comes close to what the RTX 4080 has to offer, this price advantage for AMD will have a huge impact on this kind of economic environment.
It seems like Nvidia either forgot or doesn’t care that no one has any money to throw in a super high-end graphics card right now, even if it’s the best graphics card in the world. As with the World Cup, AMD can significantly improve Nvidia’s position in the market simply by fighting Team Green to a tie at the moment, or even reducing Nvidia’s lead to a narrower margin while still remaining far from Nvidia’s best.
For a lot of PC gamers it really comes down to whether something is good enough to upgrade and since everyone missed the Nvidia Ampere there’s almost no universe where AMD isn’t making a super compelling deal for Nvidia GTX 1650 owners to go to Team Red at the moment.
Nvidia’s RTX 4080 sales have been slow, which tells you everything you need to know
Even according to Nvidia’s reasoning, if these reports are to be believed, it must lower the price of the RTX 4080 to “stimulate sales”. We’ve been following Nvidia’s RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 stocks and noticed that the Nvidia RTX 4090 is selling out very, very quickly.
Meanwhile, on the first day of RTX 4080 sales, there was still stock available after 24 hours in the UK, and it took a few hours for the RTX 4080 to sell in the US, which could very well have been driven by those poor unfortunate scalpers who now can’t sell their CPUs graphics even at the suggested retail price.
This is something we immediately identified in our RTX 4080 review: its suggested retail price killed any reason to buy the card. If you’re losing that much cash, just buy the RTX 4090. Why settle for second place for $1200?
The slow sales of the RTX 4080 seem to confirm this as it really seems like everyone is waiting to see how well the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT perform before making a decision. No matter what happens, AMD has at least done what no one else has been able to do, which is to get Nvidia to price their graphics cards more sensibly.