If you’ve been putting off buying a new Nvidia graphics card, the wait might cost you. Reports this week say Nvidia could raise GeForce GPU prices by as much as 30%.
That’ll sting for anyone building a gaming PC or planning an upgrade this year. A $700 card today could run closer to $900 once the hike lands, and in some cases it’s already happening at stores. We’ve been here before, too. GPU prices spiked hard during the crypto mining boom a few years back, and just when things finally settled down, this shortage showed up.
What’s Driving the Price Jump
The culprit is a shortage of GDDR7, the memory type Nvidia’s newer cards depend on. That memory now makes up more than 80% of what it costs to build a high-end graphics card. That’s according to industry reports. AMD is facing the same squeeze too, with some of its cards seeing similar price bumps.
Taiwan’s Economic Daily News reports Nvidia has already raised prices on GPU kits sold to board partners. Those partners include Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. The increase reportedly runs 20% to 30%. Those companies build and sell the actual cards you find in stores. A hike at that level tends to trickle down to the shelf price.
It’s already showing up on some models. The RTX 5070 Ti has jumped 25% to around $1,000. The RTX 5080 now runs closer to $1,400. Some RTX 5090 cards are selling for well over $3,000, more than triple Nvidia’s original price.
Nvidia’s own finance chief has said the memory shortage will keep weighing on the gaming business well into next year. A planned refresh of the RTX 50 lineup was supposed to ease the memory crunch by fitting in more VRAM. That refresh has stalled out too, since it needed the same scarce memory it was designed to fix.
If you need a GPU soon, cards with 8GB of memory are still selling closer to their original prices. That includes the RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti. Anything above that tier is only getting pricier. Holding out for a better deal isn’t likely to pay off this time. If a full prebuilt fits your budget better, some gaming PCs under $1,000 still lean on these smaller-memory cards, which keeps their price tags from climbing as fast.