Users who follow the news from the high-tech world know that the cryptocurrency is now far from its best times – in this regard, the business of NVIDIA and AMD, which has been successfully selling video cards at incredibly inflated prices over the past few years, has suffered. Now that mining cryptocurrencies has become unprofitable, the secondary market has been flooded with used video cards that cost significantly less than new ones, thus preventing market giants from selling their new models. But it turns out that this isn’t the only blow to NVIDIA and AMD’s business – a new disaster has come from China.

Chinese mass media, citing local retailers, report that the sharp drop in prices has made not only the market of used video cards, but also new models significantly cheaper. Major online stores in China currently sell NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards at well below recommended retail prices; in some cases the store price is 38% lower than the manufacturer’s recommended price. Market analysts explain this for two reasons – the first, of course, is the large flow of BU video cards, which significantly hinders the sale of new products, although the buyer has the opportunity to buy a “killed” card on the secondary market. two years mining

But the second reason is also obvious – against the background of the shortage and huge demand for miners’ video cards, NVIDIA and AMD have increased the prices of their products. The cost of new products has indeed been greatly inflated over the last two or three years, including logistics and the pandemic, but now the MSRP looks extremely high as demand has dropped and logistics has been implemented. And all things considered, the Chinese market will not be the only one soon – we should expect similar price changes around the world in the near future.

And the most surprising thing is that the biggest drop in price is seen in flagship graphics cards – with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti currently only 4.1 percent cheaper than the recommended value in China, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti lost 38. % price. A similar situation was observed with the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090 – they lost 29% and 33% respectively. Given the fact that these are quite expensive video cards, a potential buyer will really notice the difference in cost, but the entry-level segment will be almost unaffected.