Are GPU price drops over? Rumor claims graphics cards are only going one way now - up in price

All we've been hearing of late is about GPU price drops - that and current-gen graphics cards flailing badly for sales (with NVIDIA especially) - but we could be at the bottom of the market now, one YouTube leaker reckons.

Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) has a new video discussing GPU prices, with sources telling the leaker that sales are now picking up.

One retailer informs MLID that things are turning around and GPU sales started to climb in July, and have continued to gain momentum throughout the month.

Those selling well are cheap RDNA 2 graphics cards - something we've seen indicated in the past - and the RX 7900 XT and XTX GPUs (if discounted). For NVIDIA, low-end Ampere is starting to move up a gear too (doubtless due to its affordability).

MLID further notes that anecdotally, looking at the likes of RX 7900 graphics cards which have received some fairly deep price cuts, these are now back up a good chunk (at more like the pricing level they were at a couple of months ago, or even a few months). Some NVIDIA Lovelace graphics cards are, however, still dropping in price (we see at Newegg there is an RTX 4060 model below MSRP now).

MLID reached out to further sources across the industry, and tells us a large US retailer observed sales picking up for AMD graphics cards and low-end RTX 3000. Another big online retailer noted that AMD's RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPUs were really selling ("killing it" in fact), and that recent price cuts had been overly aggressive - and that people should expect prices to rise soon.

The only way is up? Mostly...

MLID concludes that therefore the GPU market looks like it could be bottoming out. There may still be price drops on some models, but the leaker warns that overall - on average - prices will likely be going up. And that recent prices such as $700 for a 7900 XT represent the lowest they will go.

Graphics cards aside, the broader PC component market is witnessing sales tick up, too. There are some interesting nuggets from MLID's sources claiming that SSDs are selling well for example. That's unsurprising as these too have seen some pretty big price drops consistently (over the past year or so).

The same retailer that made this observation also highlighted 4K monitors as selling very well all of a sudden, which is a bit of a curveball for us (cost-of-living crisis, and all).

Micro Center, which has the exclusive on AMD's new 5600X3D processor, is seeing this chip selling "fast" too, which doesn't surprise us - it was always going to be a popular model. Perhaps that CPU may be encouraging some spending on new rigs and potentially new GPUs to go in them.