This week’s introduction of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs has coincided with the lowest prices seen on the prior generation of GeForce GPUs in months.
The cryptocurrency boom was good business for GPU makers, sending the cost of years-old GPUs higher than their introductory prices. For end users who weren’t hoping to earn back the price of their purchase by mining cryptocurrency, that means prices become inflated and hard to justify, ultimately increasing the cost of a VR Ready PC.
This week NVIDIA revealed their new GeForce RTX GPUs, which bring real-time ray tracing and AI acceleration to the mix. Along with the cryptocurrency boom dying down, NVIDIA’s prior GTX generation of GPUs have been pushed back down to reasonable prices.
We analyzed prices on Amazon US from the range of NVIDIA’s GTX 10-series VR Ready GPUs and found a consistent downward trend, reaching at or near their lowest prices in months as the announcement of the RTX cards neared. Here’s what we found when looking at MSI’s ‘Gaming’ 10-series cards:
With the RTX cards announced but not actually starting to ship until late September, we expect this trend to continue and for prices to fall still further. We expect there to be a ‘sweet spot’ for low prices between when NVIDIA’s own ‘Founder’s Edition’ RTX cards begin shipping (late September) and the later date when RTX cards from third-party card makers start shipping.
While the RTX cards are capable of bringing some impressive new visuals to traditional games, how effectively their new abilities will translate to improving VR won’t be clear until they hit the streets and we have a chance to put them through the paces. As ever, it will depend heavily on whether or not developers embrace the new rendering capabilities, though NVIDIA appears to be making progress there with some blockbuster titles and major studios committing support.
