Nvidia might consider lowering the price of the RTX 4080, but it’s not because AMD swears

The battle of next-generation graphics cards between Nvidia and AMD appears to be heating up ahead of the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX in a week as Nvidia is said to be preparing to lower the price of the RTX 4080 in mid-December to compete with Team Red’s latest flagship.

The price cut rumor comes courtesy of Twitter Harukase 5719 (Opens in a new tab)who said that the price of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 would be “adjusted” in mid-December and that Nvidia was doing so not in response to AMD’s upcoming release, but rather in response to “its own considerations”, particularly the price-performance ratio and to help improve sales.

This last point is certainly possible as it has been reported that speculators have struggled to sell their bootleg graphics cards as well as they have been able to do in the past. But the fact that AMD’s next-gen GPU is so close and priced significantly lower than Nvidia’s RTX 4080 can’t get around, and the rumored timing of the RTX 4080’s price drop is clearly set to say the least. So what is going on here?

Nvidia got the price of the RTX 4080 very wrong, giving AMD a big chance

Even with the price drop, Nvidia really missed launching the RTX 4080. Not only did it create confusion by initially announcing two RTX 4080 cards, one with 16GB of VRAM and the other with 12GB, and then “not releasing” the 12GB version, which was Also the cheaper of the two cards, leaving both next-gen cards north. $1,200 (once taxes and/or shipping are factored in).

Now the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is also playing that manufacturer’s game that claims “our flagship card sells for less than $1,000!” By charging less than a penny and a $999.99 victory ad, the RX 7900 XT also comes in at $900, which means at least One Its launch cards will sell for under a thousand dollars, and if the performance of these two cards is anywhere near what the RTX 4080 offers, then this pricing advantage for AMD will make a huge difference in this kind of economy environment.

Nvidia seems to have forgotten or doesn’t care that no one has any big bucks right now to drop a premium graphics card, even if it’s the best graphics card in the world. Just like the World Cup, AMD could gain a significant lead in Nvidia’s market position simply by fighting Team Green for a tie now, or even reduce Nvidia’s lead to a narrower margin while still ultimately falling short of Nvidia’s best.

For many PC gamers here it will really decide whether something is good enough to upgrade and since everyone has missed Nvidia Ampere there is almost no world where AMD won’t make a very compelling case for Nvidia GTX 1650 owners to move up to a team. Red this.

Sales of the Nvidia RTX 4080 have been slow, which tells you everything you need to know

Even by Nvidia’s reasoning, if this report is to be believed, it needs to lower the price of the RTX 4080 to “spur sales.” We’ve been tracking Nvidia RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 inventory, and we’ve seen the Nvidia RTX 4090 sell out very, very quickly.

Meanwhile, on the first day of sale for the RTX 4080, there was still stock available in the UK after 24 hours and it took several hours for the RTX 4080 to sell out in the US, probably motivated by these poor brokers. who now can’t sell their GPUs even at MSRP.

It’s something we identified right away in our review of the RTX 4080: the MSRP killed any reason to buy the card. If you’re dropping that much cash, you’ll only be buying the RTX 4090. Why settle for $1,200 in second place?

Slow sales of the RTX 4080 seem to bear this out since it really seems like everyone is waiting to see how well the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT stack up before making a decision. No matter what happens, AMD has at least done what no one else could have done, which is get Nvidia to price its graphics cards sensibly.