Toward the end of last year, it was already expected that rising memory costs would eventually affect consumers, and not only in the RAM market. That moment has now arrived. MSI has officially confirmed that it is increasing the prices of its graphics cards.
MSI Raises Prices on GeForce RTX 50 Series
According to reports from Taiwan, MSI has already applied a new price increase to its NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards. Even more concerning for buyers is that other major brands, such as ASUS and GIGABYTE, are expected to follow the same path and announce their own price adjustments before the end of the month.
The main reason behind this increase is the rising cost of GDDR6 and GDDR7 memory. NVIDIA has reportedly informed its partners that combined “GPU + VRAM” packages are now more expensive to purchase. While manufacturers are trying to keep official launch prices unchanged, pressure on the supply chain is causing custom models to become more expensive.
On January 16, NVIDIA officially notified its AIC partners that all bundled GDDR6 and GDDR7 memory packages were going up in price. While exact figures were not shared, sources indicate that NVIDIA’s increases are still lower than those previously announced by AMD to its own partners.
Market data paints a difficult picture for users planning a PC upgrade. Reports from Commercial Times indicate that AMD raised prices on its Radeon RX 9000 series about a week ago, with increases ranging from 10% to 18%.
The same report also notes that RTX 50 graphics cards with 16 GB of memory or more could see price increases of 15% to 20%.
Overall, the outlook for the graphics card market is far from positive. The situation is starting to resemble the period of the Bitcoin mining boom, which heavily impacted stock availability and prices during the RTX 30 generation.
