Is the video card market going down? We can only hope!

“It won’t be a cheap video card!” – declared Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, and he meant it. The multi-year GeForce RTX 3050/3060/3070 cards are still asking a fortune, and AMD isn’t pushing them hard enough. This was compounded by the price strategy that Nvidia launched the GeForce RTX 40 series at a significantly higher starting price. What was the reaction of gamers to this?

Well, they either switched to a console or waited,

but people simply don’t need an RTX 4070 for HUF 300,000 or an RTX 4080 for HUF 500,000 – and we absolutely understand that. What does the offended Nvidia do? Well, it produces less, but it doesn’t lower prices! Well, to this not-so-loveable response, Nvidia received a wake-up call from a somewhat unexpected place. And this place is none other than game developers.

VRAM is like a banana peel

It’s not hard to find a catch on a PC game port or even a game written natively for PC these days. Besides the bugs, the most painful thing is that they use hardware resources wastefully – in a more embarrassing way than ever before. Scandalously exaggerated system requirements are published as a test, where they describe in black and white that if you want high resolution, beautiful visuals and, say, ray tracing, then you must pack 2 million configs on your desktop. Well, it’s not exactly a friendly attitude either, but at least you can take comfort in the fact that it’s also painful for Nvidia: 8 GB of VRAM was simply written off by the developers. For this reason, a number of video cards were immediately removed from the menu, these are precisely the RTX 3070 and RTX 3070 Ti, which are offered by specialist shops for a hair-raising amount of between 230 and 250 thousand and 260 and 320 thousand HUF at the time of writing this article – and there are quite a few more of them in stock.

But we would also warn everyone against the HUF 170-210 thousand RTX 3060 Ti, in fact, don’t buy an RTX 3060 for HUF 130-150 thousand – even though you get at least 12 GB of VRAM. Of these, only the RTX 3050 is a worse decision: HUF 100-130 thousand for a card with 8 GB of memory and a GPU so weak that

in a normal world, they would sell it to customers for HUF 50,000.

And then all this is further complicated by the arrival of the RTX 4060. Here we are about to get three types of models, two of which have 8 GB of VRAM! The RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB will be the first to arrive at around USD 400, which at home will easily be HUF 180-220 thousand – this will compete with the HUF 160-180 thousand AMD Radeon RX 6700/6750 XT, which is still strong in the mid-range category and 12 With GB of VRAM, you won’t have the same problems that the 8 GB RTX 4060 Ti can handle right now.

The RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB is only expected in the middle of summer, but in return it will be more expensive, not a little. It will arrive in domestic stores for well over HUF 200,000, maybe around HUF 220-240,000. And what do you get for that? A GeForce that has to compete with 16 GB Radeons with respectable rasterization power (Radeon RX 6950 XT can be purchased for around HUF 260-280 thousand!) and RTX 4070, which is not exactly a good buy.

We can also count on a vanilla RTX 4060 with 8 GB of VRAM, which some may win, but it will be launched for $ 300 and at this level you can currently get an RTX 2060, RTX 3050 or RTX 3060. Hopefully, it will be more powerful than these, even with the suffocating 8 GB of RAM, but it is certain that it will also be more energy efficient (and therefore quieter and will heat up less). If nothing else, it might be a good idea to remove long-outdated cards from the offer.

The second-hand market is going down

What can already be observed is the collapse of the used market. The prices of 8 GB video cards, which until recently were still considered powerful, went into free fall. This trend is expected to strengthen even further, monthly price drops of over 10% can be expected for some models – if you manage to wait for the right moment (we would also warn against the expensive 10/12 GB former top models, unless you are running into an occasional purchase) .

At the same time, it is not worth choosing an 8 GB VGA on the used market, unless the goal is to run 1080p and e-sport (possibly long-standing AAA titles) – but no, we do not recommend it even then. RTX 3050 and RX 6400/6500 should really only be bought by those who get stuck at a ridiculously low price and don’t want to play new titles.

Patience!

You are best off if you wait a little longer, because although we have reservations about the performance, pricing and availability of the RTX 4060 models, it is certain that they will rearrange the range. We are secretly hoping for mid-range AMD Radeons to disrupt the system, but unfortunately we have been disappointed several times in the past, so we don’t bet on that, let it be a pleasant surprise of a brazenly underpriced Radeon RX 7600 and/or RX 7800, which will force Nvidia to step up (and to show some modesty). . Ah, but it’s that crazy emotion-driven thinking again, which always ends in a bitter sobriety – I wish it was different this time!

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