The Nvidia RTX3080Ti went on sale and – not surprisingly – sold out immediately. On the one hand, it is another sign of the times. This is another powerful graphics card that is inaccessible to gamers.
Like the first high-end graphics card launched since the GPU shortage began, there is one more embarrassing thing about the price of the RTX 3080 Ti.
Prior to this announcement, it was rumored that the card would cost $1,000. It’s $ 300 more than the RTX 3080 and is compatible with AMD’s top-end card, the Radeon RX 6800 XT. Instead, it was launched at eye-watering $1,200.
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It’s much cheaper than the $1,500 RTX 3090, yes. However, doubling the performance improvement and price increase by 5% to 15% over the RTX 3080 – 72% premium to be exact – the $699 non-To version, does not add mathematics. Nvidia raised the price without raising enough performance. Wow?
What’s an extra $200?
Here the high price of RTX can be attributed to one of three things. First, amid a global semiconductor shortage, GPU makers, including rival AMD, are wreaking havoc, with too little going for the card leading to a situation where demand reduces the company’s production capabilities. This would be the most sensitive analysis of the pricing situation, which would give Nvidia the benefit of the doubt.
The other explanation is that with the recent RTX 3080 and AMD’s latest Radeon RX 6000 series cards, these 4K-capable GPUs have become so affordable, especially when compared to the more expensive cards of previous generations.
However, the RTX 3080 Ti, designed to be a true successor to the previous generation RTX 2080 Ti, is identical to its predecessor. In fact, when inflation costs are taken into account, 2018 $1,199 RTX 2080 Ti will cost $1,261 today from its 2018 launch, making the RTX 3090 approximately $ 60 cheaper! Nvidia has really little incentive to offer the cheapest historical prices.
The last possible explanation is less favorable to Nvidia. Gamers and makers working from home during the global epidemic are chanting slogans for Nvidia’s GeForce solutions and looking to use the company’s demand to guarantee substantial price premiums. When the company initially unveiled its GeForce RTX3000 series lineup, retailers for the GPU claimed that demand for the card launched during the Black Friday shopping holiday had surpassed historic GPU searches.
“On the day of our RTX 3000 launch, [we’ve seen] 10 times the traffic of previous launches, and retailers around the world just experienced really unprecedented demand, with many of them telling us that they were seeing traffic that exceeded Black Friday,” Nvidia’s Justin Walker told us in a prior conference call ahead of the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti launch.
No one’s going to bat an eye paying an extra $200 for the hottest new graphics card, especially when older cards have been selling for double the retail price in secondary markets. In other words, Nvidia knew it could charge more and effectively sell out of its stock. Nvidia’s bottom line doesn’t distinguish between scalpers and actual gamers.
There’s no easy solution to fix the global chip shortage, and fighting off scalpers is an equally daunting challenge. It’s hard to blame Nvidia for pricing up its products simply because it can, but Nvidia’s case for caring about gamers has never been weaker.
