Ah, video games. For many of us, these digital playgrounds offer a temporary escape from the tedious labour that puts food on the table. Whether you’re a hardcore role playing game enthusiast or a furiously competitive gamer, video games are a pastime that most of us can enjoy regardless of our profession or station in life.
That changed however, early on in the year 2021. Without warning, the prices of graphics cards skyrocketed. Now, even older last generation GPUs are rising steadily in price, turning video games into an increasingly expensive pastime. Coupled with the limited availability of consoles like the PS5 and XBOX Series X, many of us have been left scratching our heads as we ask one simple question: why?
Obviously, this isn’t the worst thing happening right now. The world has been turned upside down by the pandemic, and a shortage of computer components is hardly the most disturbing amongst these events. Still, it’s unfortunate that one of the best ways to keep your mind occupied is now more expensive than ever during a time when isolation and boredom are also at an all-time high.
This brings us back to the question, “why?”. Why are graphics cards suddenly expensive? When are they going to go back down? Are these increasing prices solely the result of the pandemic, or are there other factors in play? In this article we’ll be doing our best to answer these questions, and tell you how you can game affordably without spending too much. Let’s get into it!
A Market Susceptible to Disruption
In the past decade, computers have become more powerful than was previously imagined possible. Crunching gigabytes of data each second, modern personal computers are able to render scenery and environments more complex and detailed than ever before. These unfathomable advances can be attributed to advancements in one particular aspect of computing: microchips.
Simply put, microchips are small pieces of silicon housing many electronic circuits. These electronic circuits can house large quantities of information and perform logical and mathematical operations.
While computing devices have been steadily growing smaller and smaller for nearly a century, the pace of this development has been exponentially increasing in recent years. Better computer chips mean more demand, which is followed by increased supply, which is then in turn followed by increased investment in the sector.
With no end to this yearly cycle in sight, the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution frameworks responsible for getting these components to market have come under tremendous strain. While careful optimizations by manufacturers and distributors have proven successful in keeping things running smoothly under normal circumstances, the past two years have been anything but normal.
Cryptocurrency Mining and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Now that we’ve discussed the precarious market that is computing hardware, let’s talk GPUs. These powerful computer chips primarily function as the go-between for the central processor and the display in a PC setup, performing a number of different duties that revolve around rendering visual imagery and environments.
Cryptocurrency: the Bane of the Budget Gamer
Here’s the catch with graphics cards: rendering visual imagery isn’t all they can do. While their primary advertised application is graphics processing, the structure and architecture of GPU units allows them to perform a plethora of different tasks simultaneously, in a far more efficient fashion than a conventional consumer CPU.
Prior to the 2010s, only a small fraction of the GPUs sold were used for these secondary applications. Small numbers of computer scientists and hobbyists would use GPU units for machine learning rigs and other research purposes, but the vast majority of graphics cards were used as they were intended to be used.
That started to change however, when cryptocurrency mining began to become profitable. At first crypto slowly gained an audience, but over time crypto began gaining popularity among tech aficionados and the general public. The merits of this technology are too compelling to be ignored, and more and more people jumped on the bandwagon by the day.
Unfortunately for video game enthusiasts, the multi-thread architecture of GPUs makes them perfect for cryptocurrency mining. As crypto gained value and popularity, demand for graphics cards increased proportionally, gradually driving prices up further and further. When the price of a single bitcoin reached $50,000 earlier this year, you can imagine how it affected GPU pricing!
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Supply Issues
Of course, crypto mining isn’t the only thing that caused graphics cards to increase in price. There was that other thing… what was it again? Oh yeah, that’s right: the global pandemic! Early last year, the world was thrown into turmoil as governments scrambled to enact restrictions on travel, trade, work and anything else that could cause the virus to spread with more virulence.
While this new global state of affairs caused varying levels of difficulty to companies in different market sectors, computer component manufacturers were among those most adversely affected. This was the result of a number of different factors that affected all businesses to one extent or another, but the two largest points of contention were manufacturing and demand.
Manufacturing the microprocessors and other components for GPUs is a highly complex and time consuming process, demanding highly trained personnel, hermetically sealed manufacturing plants and expensive materials.
As a result of this, the companies that manufacture microchips like those inside GPUs are forced to strike a delicate balance and avoid both overproduction and underproduction. If they manufacture too many components, product value will tank and revenue will decrease; if they manufacture too few, other companies will exploit the gap in the market.
Normally demand is not particularly difficult to assess and predict. During the pandemic, huge swaths of the consumer market changed their buying behaviours and spending habits. With a plethora of new factors to take into account and painfully little hard data to work with, microchip manufacturers generally opted in favor of underproducing rather than overproducing. With decreased supply and increased demand, prices rose!
Conclusion
Fear not! If you’re looking to dip your toes into the waters of video games but don’t have thousands to spend on a GPU, there are other options. The first and most obvious of these is to simply buy an older unit. While an older graphics card is unlikely to be quite as efficient as a new one, many one and two generation-old cards are very capable and offer comparable performance to newer models at a much lower price.
Another excellent option is to buy a last-generation gaming console. While these can’t compete with the hardware specifications of high-end gaming PCs, most titles run exceptionally well on the XBOX Series X and PS5, offering a competitive experience at a fraction of the price. The bottom line is this: if you want to start gaming, explore other options. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!