A new report out of a South Korean outlet has indicated that manufacturers of graphics cards (GPUs) could kill off budget lines. This comes as memory prices soar, making the lower-end hardware less viable.
According to The Korea Economic Daily (KED), video RAM (VRAM) prices have matched the shooting DDR4 and DDR5 RAM prices, which are in hot demand at the moment. With data centers and artificial intelligence projects hoovering up increasingly expensive parts at an unprecedented pace, demand for RAM has been driven up in both areas.
It’s gotten so bad that the website is reporting that DRAMeXchange, a price tracker, has shown memory prices have doubled over the last month. Breaking those figures down for non-gaming hardware, KED reports that the cost currently looks like this:
* Server – 40-53% taken up by memory costs
* AI PC – 25%
* Smartphones – 18%
Worse, manufacturers like Asus are looking to reduce memory configurations. As RAM is needed elsewhere, these manufacturers will be looking to shave bits off on other products.
Now, Nvidia and AMD are mulling whether or not to kill off their bottom-tier GPUs. This would impact cards like AMD’s Radeon 9060 and Nvidia’s RTX 5050 and 5060 lines. While Intel makes graphics cards, it’s not mentioned in the report, as the dedicated GPU line, Arc’s existence often exists tenuously at best.
Graphics cards could end up more expensive because of no budget hardware
GPU prices have been in the dirt for quite some time now, with massive price increases during the pandemic’s electronics shortage and crypto bubble sticking around after the fact. Since 2017, external factors have caused GPUs mainly focused on gaming to be bought up rapidly.
When I was working for Scan Computers, a UK PC reseller, it was cheaper to recommend a freshly built PC with the GPU than it was to simply purchase the GPU. This type of thing happened again between 2021 and 2023, as a major crypto bubble was blown up as hype and misinformation led the way.
When it burst, along with NFTs, the prices didn’t sag like they did last time. In fact, Nvidia had found a new market to exploit – AI – and kept the prices raised, as it now knew people would simply purchase its hardware regardless.
The current AI bubble has inflated prices once again, and as tech moguls and billionaires move their money in and out of it, regular consumers are left to suffer.
Disregarding pricing, the end of budget GPUs is something that will definitely hurt players more than companies. The most popular GPUs on Steam are, in fact, budget-level cards, with the RTX 3060 (2021) and even GTX 1060 (2016) and 1660 (2019) still high on the list of hardware being used.
Nvidia and AMD’s budget options are pretty bad at the moment
Considering value, it’s not like these lower-tier pieces of kit have been at the top of people’s recommended hardware. The RTX 4060 and 5060 were both underwhelming entries, looking as if Nvidia was trying to pull a fast one on consumers. Meanwhile, AMD has made less than a smudge of an impact with its RX 9060, with only a small percentage of players opting to go for the RX 9070 line over Nvidia, one of its only two dedicated GPU lines from the current generation.
What’s next for budget graphics cards?
Despite all of this, it wouldn’t be like either brand is pulling entirely out of the budget side of things. AMD’s APU chips (a combination of GPU and CPU) are far exceeding expectations, especially with the latest round, Strix Halo.
The top-end chip, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, comes with a Radeon 8060S, which can rival the RTX 4060. In a singular chip. You can see why companies like OneXPlayer are using them in handhelds, even though it’s just not practical.
Nvidia also has its own chip that’s currently found in its own custom AI box. These aren’t ready for the “prime time” in terms of regular people (plus the boxes cost $4,000), but are an absolute indication that we could see “budget” boxes powered by Nvidia’s or AMD’s APUs in the future.
The downside here is that RAM is vital to APUs. RAM acts as a shared pool on the hardware, and handhelds or mini PCs tend to ship with a minimum of 16GB, which, if nicely split in half, gives 8GB to both the CPU and GPU. Now go look up people’s reactions to 8GB hardware from Nvidia.
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