One of the biggest events in the PC technology world this year was the launch of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 series cards. Nvidia, though, has only released two of the GeForce RTX 40 cards so far: the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080.
The GeForce RTX 4090 is something of a powerhouse as you can imagine, and has an equally hefty price tag to match – its MSRP is a whopping $1,599 US dollars. Meanwhile, the RTX 4080 cannot be considered particularly cheap either given its $1,199 US dollar MSRP.
Of course, these are high end graphics cards and they are priced accordingly, but the GeForce RTX 4080 in particular seems overpriced when compared to its predecessor. This is because the earlier RTX 3080 had a manufacturer’s suggested retail price or MSRP of $699 US dollars, more than 70 % less than that of the RTX 4080.
Granted, the RTX 4080 can be up twice as fast as the RTX 3080 when it comes to ray tracing, but the difference in price between the RTX 40 series card and its last-gen predecessor is eye popping to say the least.
This is why some may cheer the news that Nvidia might be considering dropping the price of its GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card, as was recently reported on PC Gamer. According to a leak by a Twitter user (who uses the handle harukaze5719), Nvidia would be cutting the price of the RTX 4080 in mid-December.
Apparently, this has nothing to do with the fact that AMD will be launching its new graphics cards based on its RDNA 3 chipset on December 13. AMD itself has said that its upcoming high-end RX 7900 XTX card is a RTX 4080 competitor – and its sub-$1000 US dollar price could worry Nvidia, as on paper at least it looks like the Radeon RX 7900 XTX could be a compelling alternative to the GeForce RTX 4080.
According to boardchannels, RTX 4080 will be adjusted price in mid-Dec.
However, the source emphasized price cut isn’t afraid of RDNA3, but from its own considerations. Price is appropriately reduced to improve price-perf ratio and stimulate sales.https://t.co/M0bXfHqDZI
— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) December 5, 2022
Nonetheless, it seems that Nvidia cutting the price of the RTX 4080 has to do with improving the price to performance ratio and driving up sales rather than competition from AMD. Which is something that makes sense taking into account that Jensen Huang’s (Nvidia’s CEO) company owns about 80 % of the market for discrete graphics cards.
Also, Nvidia’s chief financial officer (CFO for short) Collette Kress said that the company had “been under shipping gaming at this time”. She added that the company “will likely get to where we’ll be selling in to build the channel for our Ada launch and all of the additional Ada products that we will see coming to market”, which is something that should help drive prices of its RTX 40 series cards, including the RTX 4080, down next year.
This rumored price cut for the RTX 4080 is definitely good news for those who are considering buying the card and were put off by the price tag, but is also means that upcoming graphics cards like the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti might also end up being cheaper than previously thought when they arrive next year.
GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card (Nvidia Corporation)