This is what we've been waiting for, actual manufacturers meaningfully dropping prices on their graphics cards. We've noticed recently that GPU stock levels have been getting back to healthy levels across a swathe of different cards, but though prices have been dropping, they're still too high.
But with Asus confirming to us that it "is reducing MSRP aggressively" it means that actual retail pricing can now follow suit, hopefully soon. And it's not just in the cards nobody wants either, such as the Radeon RX 6500 XT—which has remained at, or even below MSRP for much of its life—we're now seeing pricing coming down across a host of different GPUs.
"Asus has been dropping pricing across all SKUs," an Asus representative tells us.
It looks like Asus is looking to jump first as GPU pricing inevitably drops. With an increase in supply obviously out there, and demand still sky-high for graphics cards, manufacturers are going to have to start putting in the work if they wants users to buy their cards.
And when pricing is still punitive elsewhere, the first to actually drop its GPU pricing will see the lion's share of users buying its cards over the competition.
That's echoed by Dr. Thomas Goldsby, a noted supply chain expert, who tells us: "A supplier out there will get nervous that they are sitting on considerable supply for an item that has a limited shelf life (with newer cards entering the market) and will make the move to clear out that excess inventory.
"Peer suppliers will then have to follow that lead. And back to equilibrium we fall."
Indeed there are reports that the next big GPU to launch, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, has had a significant price cut compared to where it would have been positioned had it launched back in January as expected. And we've heard similar refrain from our own contacts, too.
If that does come to pass when the new Nvidia card is launched then that's just further proof that GPU pricing really is on its way to normalising.
