Shocking but not surprising: The average price of a GPU at retail has doubled since 2020

This is not surprising, but it is still pretty shocking to see the numbers laid out like this: According to figures sourced from German retailer Mindfactory.de, the average price graphics cards are selling for has doubled since 2020.

Wind back the clock to February 2020, and AMD cards were selling for an average of just over €295. Nvidia's GPUs, meanwhile, commanded a higher average selling price of €427.

Jump forward three years and the numbers make for some ugly reading unless you run a graphics card-making business, I guess. The average selling price for AMD has leapt up to fully €600, while Nvidia GPUs are now selling for an average of €825 on Mindshare.de. So, that's near enough exactly double for both brands.

To put those numbers into context regarding exchange rates, the dollar figures are $315 for AMD in February 2020, increasing to $640 this year, and $455 increasing to $880 for Nvidia.

That's for all GPUs and so includes both the latest Nvidia RTX 40 series and AMD's new RX 7900 boards. For clarity, the figures are said to be Mindfactory's sales numbers, but are posted second hand on Twitter with no primary source links provided. It is also just from a single retailer, but it still shows a quite clear trend in the industry.

Given the way advertised GPU prices have inflated in the last few years, the numbers are not exactly a huge surprise. And yet they still make for tough reading.

Broadly, the assumption is that AMD and Nvidia must know what they are doing. But we still find it very hard to compute that an average selling price of nearly $900 for Nvidia GPUs—which is the dominant player with the majority of sales—is sustainable for PC gaming.

Does your average PC gamer have $900 for just a GPU, never mind a CPU, RAM, SSD, motherboard and monitor? And if they do, what does that say about PC gaming?

It's certainly interesting to note that pricing for many kinds of gaming-relevant hardware hasn't gone into orbit. CPU pricing remains within touch of historical norms and you can buy a high refresh gaming monitor for $150.

So, for now, we're sticking to our expectations that this GPU price spike will eventually restrict sales so severely that some kind of adjustment is inevitable. But as the months and years tick by, it's certainly harder to argue against the notion that a new "normal" hasn't arrived. But we'll keep doing that. For now.