Availability and pricing
Availability and pricing on better graphics cards continue to improve, with more than half of current-gen AMD and Nvidia GPUs selling at or below MSRP. We’ve been tracking GPU prices on eBay for over a year as it used to be the best place to find cards that were actually in stock, but that’s no longer the case. Amazon, Newegg, and other online retailers often have stock available, sometimes for less than what you’d normally pay on eBay. You can also get a new card instead of a potentially used model that may have been mined in recent years.
We’ve gathered all the data in one place here, looking at the best price we can find on the latest generations of GPUs. That’s eBay for anything outside of the RTX 30 series, the RX 7000 series, and also some of the GTX 16 series cards. Below, we’ll rank the cards by value for money (FPS per dollar spent) using data from ultra 1080p performance from our GPU Benchmarks hierarchy. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should go out and buy an old GPU, but it’s interesting to see how well some of the cards perform even in modern games.
eBay or Amazon
The links in the first column are for eBay or Amazon, though for current-gen graphics cards you’ll also want to check out Newegg and other retailers. Cards that offer modest performance at a low price are higher than most newer models but pay attention to the actual performance and age of the graphics card. The R9 Fury X is in second place, but it no longer has active controller support, while the GTX 780 is an older card that can’t run certain modern games (such as Far Cry 6).
AMD’s RX 6600
The best reasonably recent option is AMD’s RX 6600, which is currently available for just $290 – $40 below the official MSRP. Typical performance is similar to the GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2060 Super, and RX 5700, depending on what games you’re playing. The board also only needs around 140W, depending on the specific model.
AMD’s RX 6600 XT, RX 6650 XT, RX 6700 XT and RX 6750 XT are pretty high value overall, while the best values for a GeForce RTX card belong to the previous generation RTX 2060, 2070, 2070 Super and RTX 2080 If you’re looking for the best value in an RTX 30-series GPU, the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti are in the middle of the pack.
older GPUs
Again, older GPUs aren’t necessarily the way to go, and raw performance may be more important than a fuzzy value rating. Buying a cheap 3GB GTX 1060 for $125 will suffice for lighter gaming and internet browsing, but if you want 60fps gaming at 1080p ultra, you’ll need a card at least as fast as an RX 5700 or RTX 2060 Super, which Which brings us back to the RX 6600 and 6600 XT mentioned above, as they tend to offer better performance at a lower price.
This is the same information but restricted to only the 20 latest generation GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. AMD’s value proposition becomes much more obvious with this view, with mid-to-high-end RX 6000-series GPUs taking the top six spots. You can also get playable 1440p performance with almost all of these graphics cards, with the sole exception of the RX 6500 XT.
For Nvidia
For Nvidia, despite still having somewhat large margins over official MSRPs, the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti are relatively competitive with AMD GPUs, especially when you factor in ray tracing and DLSS performance (what the performance of the numbers does not in this table). ). Still, the best value AMD GPUs are between 0.20 and 0.23 FPS/$, while Nvidia GPUs are at 0.175 FPS/$. Unsurprisingly, extreme performance cards occupy the bottom of the table, with the RTX 3090 Ti offering less than half the FPS/$ of most other graphics cards. In fact, the only GPU on our full list above that represents a worse value is the Titan RTX.
graphics card prices are down
Taking the big picture, graphics card prices are down another 15% on average compared to the previous month. For AMD, only the RX 6800 XT and 6800 costs more than their official MSRPs of $650 and $580, respectively. On the other hand, most Nvidia RTX 30 series GPUs still sell for more than the MSRP. The extreme prices of the 3080 12GB and above mean these cards are undervalued, but the RTX 3050 up to the RTX 3080 10GB see an average 20% increase.
conclusion
This is much better than the double or triple MSRPs we saw last year, and we’re heading in the right direction, so expect all cards to sell at or below their MSRPs in the coming months. And then we will start to see high-end graphics cards, and the cycle can start again, just without crypto miners getting involved.
