Graphics cards: price development, value for money and purchase advice

With a good graphics card, PC games can be played smoothly with high details. But which graphics card series are currently recommended when it comes to value for money? We want to clarify this in our special, which also deals with the price development of the last 14 months and the constantly falling prices of graphics cards. However, we also owe the drop – 50 percent discount since last December – to a supply crisis that lasted more than a year and a half, which caused prices to rise to an horrendous level from autumn 2020 to the turn of the year 2021/22.

For graphics card purchase advice, we will also take a close look at the performance and price-performance ratio of all AMD Radeon RX 6000 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards and have prepared 20 example models in a small market overview. But what performance do you get today compared to buying a graphics card in June 2020? We’ll take a look at that too and will compare the current price-performance ratio with the graphics card that was the best in terms of price-performance at the time.

The reasons for the price crisis

The main cause of the price increase, which began in autumn 2020 and accompanied the release of the first Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards, was essentially the Covid-19 pandemic. Due to more and more working from home and restrictions on leisure activities (closed clubs, restaurants, sports facilities and so on) as well as avoiding contact, the demand for (entertainment) electronics rose sharply in 2020.

Many rediscovered PC gaming as a hobby or got back into it after a break, and even some who were gamers before wanted to buy a new graphics card in autumn 2020 anyway because they had been waiting consciously for the new Nvidia 3000 series – graphics cards so more in demand than before.

Here several graphics cards are believed to be working for mining services.

Source: Twitter




In addition, cryptocurrencies experienced a rapid rise as an investment option during the uncertain times. With graphics cards, you can primarily help with the Ethereum currency to calculate the necessary algorithms. If you use your graphics card for this, you get a share of the crypto currency as a reward – one speaks of “digging” the currency, in English “mining”.

In the process, entire parks were created, primarily in Asia, each consisting of dozens of PCs with graphics cards, which only served the purpose of mining and pulled graphics cards out of the normal market. Because of the high prices, the purchase was still worthwhile for miners even when prices were more than twice as high as in summer 2020.

Now to the supply side: Many chip and hardware factories, as well as companies involved in the supply chains, have had to work much more slowly or even temporarily stop work due to safety measures. Companies that hadn’t bought production capacity early on were left out in the cold.

This means that instead of ramping up production due to the greater demand for electronic products, production often even had to be reduced. The prices for many products and also graphics cards rose significantly, primarily basic products from the semiconductor sector were in short supply, and there were also raw material problems.

So-called scalpers even increased the problem. Scalpers buy products they suspect or know are or will be scarce comparatively cheaply and often with the help of bots, giving them an edge over regular consumers, especially when it comes to timed sales launches.