VRAM prices increase over 30% in August alone

AMD might have just launched their next-gen Radeon RX Vega graphics cards with HBM2 in tow, but it looks like SK Hynix and Samsung might be ruining the high-end/enthusiast graphics card market with increases in VRAM pricing.

DigiTimes is reporting that the market prices for graphics memory from both Samsung and SK Hynix rose by over 30% in August, with the blame being placed on both DRAM manufacturers "repurposing part of their VRAM production capacities for server and smartphone memories instead", reports AnandTech.

We should expect VRAM pricing to continue to increase according to DigiTimes' sources, with PC DRAM chips to continue getting more expensive through to 2018. Both Micron and SK Hynix have announced GDDR6 recently, with NVIDIA set to use the new standard on their Volta-based GeForce graphics cards in early 2018.

• Read more: NVIDIA stops bundling VRAM chips with GPU dies: tells AIBs to source their own GDDR chips
• Read more: SK hynix to boost DRAM production by a huge 8x in 2026, still won't be enough for RAM shortages
• Read more: Samsung accelerates HBM4E process, aims for 3.25TB/sec bandwidth ready for NVIDIA Rubin AI GPUs

We don't know if Micron's super-fast GDDR5X memory that's used on GTX 1080, GTX 1080 11Gbps, GTX 1080 Ti, and TITAN Xp will increase - but we should see this in the coming weeks if it happens.