Rumor mill: It's hard not to feel depressed by the constant news of graphics cards becoming more expensive and harder to find, so here's a more uplifting report: MSI is allegedly set to reduce the price of some of its RTX 3000 line---by almost $100 in the case of the RTX 3080.
The claim comes from the Board Channels forum (via VideoCardz), which has proved reliable on previous occasions but should still be taken with a healthy dose of salt. According to the machine-translated post, the MSI graphics card factory has adjusted the price of some Ampere cards this month.
The most significant change will allegedly be on mid- to high-specification models of MSI's RTX 3080 and 3080 Ti cards; they're reduced by 300 to 600 yuan ($47 to $94). The rest of the line isn't going to be that much cheaper: the RTX 3070/Ti prices are dropping by 100 to 300 RMB ($16 to $31), and the RTX 3060/Ti are down 100 to 200 RMB ($15 to $31). The only card that won't see any price alterations is the RTX 3090.
While that all sounds good, assuming it's true, the post starts by saying that some of MSI's RTX 3000 products have actually increased in price this month. The same user also reports that Sapphire has made its AMD RX 6000 series more expensive, adding $80 to the cost of the RX 6900, $63 to the 6600XT, and $55 to the RX 6600. The increase lines up with a recent report of AMD adding 10% to the price of its RDNA 2 GPUs after manufacturer TSMC raised costs.
Graphics card prices and availability have worsened in recent months following a brief period where things were starting to look up. Much of the problem stems from the global chip shortage, which Nvidia believes will alleviate next year. We've also heard that Nvidia and Zotac are urging the government to drop Trump-era China tariffs on cards. Let's hope it makes a difference.