It’s been a pretty good year for graphics cards, especially if you’re using Nvidia.
AMD and Intel have grabbed their share of the headlines, but it was the Nvidia name that came up most often during the changing supply and demand that has swept the GPU market over the past couple of years. Of course, many times we have been talking about how to do this expensive It could be Nvidia graphics cards, especially at the height of a global chip shortage.
Fortunately, graphics card prices are finally starting to fall out of the stratosphere in 2022, to the relief of many. This was the year I finally started seriously considering building a new gaming PC, and I know I’m not alone. But as I look ahead to 2023 and plan which GPU to buy and when, I have to think about what came out this year and what the big card companies are likely to do in the aftermath of 2022.
If, like me, you’re wondering what happened this year in GPUs and whether you should buy one now or wait until 2023, read on – here’s a brief rundown of what happened to the GPU market in 2022, and what to look for in it. Next year.
Nvidia is on top and begging for a challenge
Nvidia’s 2022 is starting to rally, due in large part to global supply chain issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Its GeForce 30-series cards started shipping in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 quarantine, and the entire line has been a hot commodity from day one. Speculators and cryptocurrency holders have been the scourge of anyone trying to buy a new RTX 3080 in 2020, and similar issues persisted throughout 2021 and into 2022.
In short, if you wanted to buy a new Nvidia GPU at the normal retail price, it was nearly impossible – until a few months ago, when new 30-series cards started appearing on store shelves in quantities that made it possible to get a normal person who would buy one at that price. less than wasteful.
Around the same time (October 12th, to be exact) Nvidia launched the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, the first of the 40 series cards. This is the current best GeForce GPU, however when you’re looking for where to buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, you’ll have no trouble finding it. Find it for MSRP at retailers like Best Buy.
That’s great news for people with a lot of money to burn on a new GPU, but apparently not great news for Nvidia, which the past year or two has seen new GPUs sell out at speeds not seen since Nintendo launched the Wii. But now global supply of GPUs appears to have caught up to demand, at least for the time being, and that suggests Nvidia’s GPU fortunes could drop a bit in 2023.
The new RTX 3080 GPU is more than powerful enough to run all the latest games at impressive frame rates
It all depends on how customers respond to the rest of the GeForce 40-series cards that launch next year. Now that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 is out alongside the 4090 and they both cost over $1,000, the big question is: how much do the other 40-series cards cost?
The truth is, it might not matter much, because there are still plenty of Series 30 cards in stock at retailers around the world. That remains true even after Nvidia’s disappointing second-quarter results in August, when CEO Jensen Huang told investors that the company’s profits were declining due to “excess inventory” of Series 30 cards, and so it would change prices and reduce the number of such cards sold to resellers. Now, almost four months later, you can still get a new RTX 3080 for less than $700 MSRP if you take the time to hunt for deals.
While true performance nerds won’t be able to tear their eyes away from all the bells and whistles of the new cards (including DLSS 3, which is only available on 40-series Nvidia GPUs), the fact is that the new RTX 3080 GPU is More than powerful enough to play all the latest games at great framerates. And since you can pick one up now for almost half the price of the new 4090, it looks like Nvidia has set itself up for a slide back in 2023.
AMD could be preparing to shine in 2023
If PC fans are turned off by the high prices (and massive power requirements) of Nvidia’s new 40-series cards, rival AMD will be there to offer an attractive alternative.
That replacement is the new AMD Radeon RX 7000 series cards, which will start hitting store shelves later this month in the form of the Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX. They offer improvements over their predecessors that are similar to what Nvidia’s latest cards offer, including performance improvements, better ray tracing support and upscaling (via AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution technology).
But perhaps more relevant is the pricing of AMD’s new, better cards: $999 for the 7900 XTX and $899 for the weaker 7900 XT. That’s hundreds of dollars less than Nvidia’s top-tier cards, and that could make a huge difference in 2023.
Of course, we’ll have to wait and see how true enthusiasts move on to AMD’s new GPUs before we know how much competition they’ll give Nvidia’s offerings. The RX 7000 series is the first series of Radeon GPUs to feature chiplet design, which, to put it (very) simple, basically means that they tightly stack self-contained “chips” together in linked configurations designed to be more robust and efficient than a single piece of silicon.
AMD is the first GPU manufacturer to try this, and it did so using lessons learned from taking a similar chiplet approach with its own CPU designs, most recently the Ryzen 7000 chips. Nvidia’s market share in 2023, but we’ll have to wait and see how the cards perform before we can say for sure.
What about Intel?
Don’t forget Intel, which re-entered the graphics card market this year decades after releasing its first Intel Arc GPUs. While we saw Arc GPUs appear in laptops as early as March, we had to wait until October to see the release of top-of-the-line Intel Arc A750 and Arc A770 GPUs.
These are the two most powerful Arc graphics cards currently on the market, and with prices starting at $289 and $329 (respectively), they’re clearly trying to compete with Nvidia and AMD’s mid-range cards. With support for hardware-based Raytracing, DirectX 12 Ultimate, and Intel’s new XeSS upgrade technology, these cards are just as capable of playing modern games as anything the competition can put them at.
Future outlook: A hot GPU summer is coming
However, it’s hard to tell how exciting the market will be for these new mid-range cards now that global supply chain issues have eased and it’s easier to find more powerful cards in stock for MSRP. We’ve seen several reviews with benchmarks suggesting the Arc 770 can rival and even outperform the similarly priced Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 in many games, so it looks like Intel has managed to provide some mid-range competition to AMD and Nvidia in 2022. .
But we’ve also seen multiple complaints of buggy drivers in our Intel Arc GPU reviews, which indicates that Intel still has some work to do before its graphics cards can be reliable recommendations.
By delaying the launch of Arc desktop GPUs from summer 2022 until the end of the year, Intel was forced to debut them alongside the latest and greatest from AMD and Nvidia. Now, it seems hard to find anyone talking about the new Arc GPUs because of the noise from the 40-series and 70-series GeForce and Radeon cards. Intel will have to give us one more reason to pay attention in 2023 if it hopes to build on the successful launch of Arc in its well-respected GPU line. We look forward to seeing if Intel can provide said reason.
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