In 2026, gamers are not only facing soaring prices for memory and SSDs, but also repeated price hikes for graphics cards, making current price levels difficult to justify purchasing.
Taking NVIDIA's RTX 50 series as an example, prices have not returned to below MSRP even after more than a year since launch. In fact, premiums have become severe this year. Among the eight models, the lowest premium is still 27%, primarily because the RTX 5050 was released recently and its base pricing already accounted for the price increases, resulting in the lowest premium rate.
Almost all other graphics cards have premiums exceeding 50%. The RTX 5060, RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, and RTX 5070 all significantly surpass the 50% mark.The most extreme case is naturally the flagship RTX 5090, with a suggested retail price of just $1,999, but an actual selling price reaching $4,699, representing a 135% premium.
The doubling of prices easily reminds gamers of the previous crypto-mining era. Over the past decade, there have been at least two major price surge cycles driven by mining: one from 2017 to 2018, typified by the GTX 10 series graphics cards, and another from 2020 to 2022, coinciding with the launch of the RTX 30 series.
In terms of premium magnitude, the two crypto-mining eras might have been even more severe than now, with graphics card price hikes of 200% being common. However, the current graphics card price increase is different from the crypto-mining scenario.Because crypto-mining cards appeared quickly and disappeared just as fast, prices plummeted back after just over a year. Ordinary gamers actually benefited from the concentrated supply of mining cards, getting the chance to buy GPUs at bargain prices.
The main reason for the current graphics card price hike is the increase in DRAM chip prices, which has pushed up the cost of GDDR memory. This is especially true for the RTX 50 series, which uses GDDR7 memory, inherently more expensive than GDDR6.
The specific price of GDDR7 depends on contract prices and product specifications. In late July, industry analyst TrendForce noted that 2GB GDDR7 chips cost around $20, while 3GB chips soared to $60–$70. This has led to the indefinite postponement of the RTX 50 Super series.
The cost of 32GB of GDDR7 alone is $320, accounting for approximately 16% of the RTX 5090's suggested retail price of $1,999. Considering NVIDIA's gross margin is around 70%, the proportion of memory cost in the total graphics card cost likely reaches 30–40% or more.
Of course, NVIDIA and GPU manufacturers are certainly not willing to take losses now. As a result, RTX 50 series graphics cards currently carry premiums of over 50%, with the RTX 5090 selling for roughly 2.5 times its suggested price, costing between 40,000 and 50,000 yuan.
More importantly, this price hike may last much longer than the crypto-mining era. Memory prices are primarily driven by AI demand, peaking in 2027 and reaching supply-demand equilibrium in 2028. However, this only means the rate of price increase will slow down; overall prices will remain high.
Conservatively estimated, prices will not return to the levels seen in the first half of 2025 before 2030. Moreover, the three major memory chip companies—Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron—are continuously suggesting that the price hike cycle will last for more than 10 years.