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AMD press conference: New cards often sell out quickly
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JAMES ATOA / imago images / UPI Photo
Anyone who currently wants to pimp their computer with a fast graphics card will usually be bitterly disappointed.
The problem: Most of the new card models are either out of stock or the retailers are charging outrageously high prices for them.
The costs for high-performance graphics cards have quadrupled in some cases over the past year, an evaluation by the price comparison portal Idealo shows.
According to this, there have been »price increases of up to 294 percent«, especially for top models.
For example, the Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil graphics card cost 444 euros a year ago, according to Idealo.
The price is now around 1,800 euros.
But even with entry-level models and mid-range cards, according to the portal, there is an upward price trend: On average, graphics cards cost 136 percent more than last year.
Nils Raettig from the game magazine »Gamestar« thinks this spring is an extremely bad time to upgrade your home gaming computer.
"You should think twice about whether you really urgently need a new graphics card at the moment," the hardware editor told SPIEGEL.
Even if the model with the four times higher price is more of an extreme case, doubling or even tripling the costs is quite common.
"Even the serious dealers adapt to the market situation and demand higher prices," says Raettig.
Are these exorbitant prices?
Oliver Buttler from the consumer advice center Baden-Württemberg also considers the prices to be remarkably high at the moment.
From a legal point of view, however, it is not about usury prices, he tells SPIEGEL: "The dealers are allowed to." One condition for usury is met, namely that at least double the price is charged.
"But I don't see an emergency in the fact that fast graphics cards for video games are becoming scarce." Such an emergency would be a further condition.
In the specific case, it is a supply-and-demand situation that is at the expense of the customer, says the consumer advocate.
"It's annoying, but legally it's okay."
Harnessed for crypto mining
One reason for the moon prices is, among other things, cryptocurrencies. Because high-performance graphics cards are not only important for high frame rates in video games, they also help to mine digital currencies. Due to the fast hash value calculation, graphics cards from manufacturers such as Nvidia and AMD are used en masse in so-called mining farms. Therefore, players accuse the US companies of having abandoned them and their hobby.
Meanwhile, Nvidia's business is doing brilliantly. The company reported record sales of $ 5.7 billion for the first quarter of its fiscal year, largely driven by sales of graphics processors for gamers. With them, Nvidia has turned over $ 2.76 billion - twice as much as in the same period last year. The company made about $ 155 million from no-screen mining cards released in February.
To appease disappointed gamers, Nvidia has announced that special models with reduced performance for hash value calculations will come onto the market this month.
These cards, marked with the "Lite Hash Rate" (LHR), are intended to deter crypto-prospectors, since mining is throttled to half power, while games are calculated at full power.
Previous tentative attempts to make digging with artificial brakes more difficult, however, showed only moderate success.
Hackers bypassed a software throttle from Nvidia - and the company accidentally even released its brake itself.
Many factors drive the price up
It remains to be seen whether the plan with the throttled cards will work.
"I'm still skeptical whether this will improve the situation for gamers," says hardware expert Raettig.
"It may well be that mining is still worthwhile with reduced performance."
Digital currencies are not the only price drivers either.
The shortage of microchips and the boom in demand for PCs in Corona times have caused supply and demand to drift far apart.
It doesn't help that AMD's models can keep up with Nvidia again after many years.
According to Raettig, switching to competing cards is not a real way out: "The price increases can be observed across all models," he says.
If you don't feel like spending more than 1000 euros on a graphics card, the second-hand market is an option for you, says Raettig: "But even there everything is overpriced."
In his opinion, the situation will not change anytime soon.
"I assume that it will stay that way for the whole year," suspects Raettig, "and the situation could still be difficult next year."
