Nvidia Corp. and Intel Corp. threw down Wednesday as the two chip makers released new gaming cards with the GPU leader targeting elite, high-performance gamers, while Intel sought to appeal to budget gamers looking for slightly better performance than Nvidia’s last generation of cards.
On Wednesday, Nvidia’s
NVDA,
flagship RTX 4090 gaming card went on sale at a suggested retail price of $1,599, a $100 premium to Nvidia’s then top-of-the-line RTX 3090 card when it was released in 2020. For gamers used to the predictability of Moore’s Law and the convention that gaming cards be similarly priced to the models they were replacing, that bump in price came as a bit of an unpleasant surprise. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang explained that Moore’s law no longer applied to gaming cards and that silicon was “a ton more expensive.”
At the end of September, Intel
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announced it would be releasing it Arc A770 GPU starting at $329 the same day the 4090 would be released. While Nvidia is catering to the bleeding-edge gamer, Intel is appealing to the more mainstream gamer with claims the A770 outperforms Nvidia’s previous generation RTX 3060 card.
The week before, Nvidia announced its next-generation RTX 4000-series of cards using the “Ada Lovelace” chip architecture, succeeding the RTX 3000-series of cards that used Ampere architecture.
See also: Chip stocks could suffer worst year ever as effects of shortage-turned-glut spread
Meanwhile, the head of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s
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Radeon product division tweeted out that is scheduled to announce its new line of RX 7000 gaming cards Nov. 3, right after earnings are release on Nov. 1.
Unlike the release of Nvidia’s RTX-3000 cards in 2020, the demand situation for gaming cards in late 2022 is the polar opposite. In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was practically impossible to find a RTX-3000 card, much less one that was even close to an unscalped list price.
On Newegg, Nvidia RTX 4090 cards listed for $1,599 were already listed as out of stock, while those in stock were selling for up to $2,845, while the A770 was on backorder and selling for $349. As for the RTX 3060 card the A770 is meant to outperform, those were selling for $399 at Best Buy.
Read: PC market in ‘steepest’ fall since data started being collected in mid-1990s, analysts agree
As the cards went on sale, Twitter lit up in response. One tweet put the price of the 4090 in perspective compared with other gaming options, noting that one could potentially buy a Sony
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PlayStation 5, a new Microsoft Corp.
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Xbox, a Nintendo Co.
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Switch, and a Steam Deck for less than what the 4090 card is listing.
One gamer even showed off his beast of a 4090 being safely transported home.
And “beast” is correct as one tweet illustrated, showing the 4090 “card” alongside a complete Xbox or PS5.
Meanwhile, others found that Intel’s A770 sold out almost immediuately.
Apparently, the limit of five per customer was not that limiting.
With Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all releasing gaming cards this fall, those prices may come down a bit, especially if PC sales continue to crater for their worst declines since the 1990s.
