by The next-gen graphics card battle between Nvidia and AMD appears to be heating up ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX launch in a week, as Nvidia will reportedly slash the price of its RTX 4080 in mid-December to keep up with the team’s latest flagship editor
The price drop rumor comes courtesy of Twitter Leaker Harukaze5719 (opens in new tab)who says that the price of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 will be “adjusted” in mid-December and that Nvidia is not doing this in response to the upcoming AMD release, but out of “own considerations”, particularly its price-performance ratio and helping the to increase sales.
According to Boardchannels, the price of the RTX 4080 will be adjusted in mid-December. However, the source does not emphasize the price reduction before RDNA3, but from their own considerations. The price will be reduced appropriately to improve value for money and boost sales.https://t.co/M0bXfHqDZIDecember 5, 2022
The latter point is definitely possible as reports suggest that scalpers have had difficulty selling their illegitimate graphics cards as they have been able to in the past. But there’s no getting around the fact that AMD’s next-gen GPU is right around the corner, and that it’s priced significantly lower than Nvidia’s RTX 4080, and the rumored timing of the RTX 4080 price drop is strikingly timed, to say the least. So what’s going on here?
Nvidia got the RTX 4080 pricing horribly, terribly wrong, giving AMD a huge opportunity
Even with a price drop, Nvidia really botched the RTX 4080 launch. Not only did it cause confusion by initially announcing two RTX 4080 cards, one with 16GB VRAM and one with 12GB, but also the 12GB version, which was also the cheaper of the two cards, “unstarted” and both next-gen cards in the North dropped from $1,200 (once you factor in taxes and/or shipping).
Now the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is playing the manufacturer’s game by claiming, “Our flagship card sells for less than $1,000!” by charging exactly one penny less and declaring a $999.99 win, but it also has the RX 7900 XT at $900, which means at least one its starting cards sell for less than a thousand dollars, and if the performance of these two cards is anywhere near what the RTX 4080 has to offer, this price advantage will make a massive difference for AMD in this type of economy environment.
It seems that Nvidia either forgot or doesn’t care that right now no one has money to go without a super high-end graphics card, even if it’s the best graphics card in the world. Just like the World Cup, AMD can significantly improve Nvidia’s market position now by simply battling Team Green to a tie, or even reducing Nvidia’s lead to a smaller lead while ultimately still falling behind Nvidia’s best.
For a lot of PC gamers out here, it’s really going to come down to whether something is good enough to upgrade, and with everyone missing out on Nvidia Ampere, there’s almost no universe where AMD doesn’t have a super compelling case for Nvidia GTX 1650- owners to make the jump to Team Red.
Nvidia RTX 4080 sales have been sluggish, which tells you everything you need to know
Even according to Nvidia’s reasoning, if this report is to be believed, the RTX 4080 needs to be priced down to “boost sales”. We’ve been keeping an eye on Nvidia RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 stocks and found that the Nvidia RTX 4090 is selling out very, very quickly.
Meanwhile, stock was still available after 24 hours on the first day of sale of the RTX 4080 in the UK and it took several hours for the RTX 4080 to sell out in the US, and that may well have driven the poor unfortunate scalpers who can’t use their GPUs now Sell once at RRP.
It’s something we immediately recognized in our review of the RTX 4080: the MSRP killed any reason to buy the card. If you’re losing that much money, just buy an RTX 4090. Why settle for second place at $1,200?
The sluggish 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 do before making a decision. No matter what, AMD at least did what no one else seemed to be able to do, which was to get Nvidia to price its graphics cards cheaper.
