For nearly two years, you had to have incredible luck, skill or patience to get an Nvidia or AMD graphics card at the MSRP. We’ve been blogging and live tweeted that hell of trying to buy a GPU online, battling an army of bots to navigate the buggy websites of retailers that didn’t have enough reason to care.

But yesterday I did the unthinkable. I’m saddled with the Best Buy website eight hours after the retailer’s weekly drop and bought an RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition for its $599 MSRP.

I also had a $499 RTX 3070 Founders Edition in my cart. And those finds were no fluke: both of those GPUs were still available when we got back this morning. The 3070 FE is still there as I type these words. So is the 3070 Ti† AMD.com currently also has the Radeon RX 6750 XT, 6900 XT and 6950 XT in stock for suggested retail price.

Image: eBay

I rushed to eBay to run through the numbers – the same ones I’ve been compiling since December 2020 to show you the true street price of a GPU. Sure enough, this week is the week that the most popular graphics cards finally reach the suggested retail price on the second-hand market. The RTX 3080 hovers around $700, the exact price Nvidia originally said it would cost.

In the past six months, the street price of a modern GPU halved. Nearly every graphics card we track has fallen more than 50 percent on eBay since January, with 30 percent since April alone.

It was also Nvidia’s most popular and best value for money cards — the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080 — that saw the biggest drops. Of those cards, the 3060 Ti is the only GPU used that can not on average at or below the suggested retail price. Meanwhile, an average AMD card will cost you $100 less than the MSRP.

The used market even seems to normalize the prices of Nvidia and AMD’s more expensive GPUs. You can pick up a used 6900 XT for $300 off its $999 list price, and I saw eBay buyers get an average of $318, $466, and $540 off Nvidia’s 3080 Ti, 3090, and 3090 Ti, respectively.

I think it’s safe to say: the major GPU shortage is over.

But should you actually buy one? That’s a much more difficult question – because the forces that ultimately drive supply and demand to meet each other aren’t all in your favor.

Why or why not buy a GPU?

Let’s say the obvious first: the chips that power these GPUs are now two years old. In October 2020, $500 might have been a great price for an RTX 3070, but is it still a great price in July 2022 with new ones on the way? The RTX 40 series and AMD’s RDNA 3 are both expected this fall and could offer significant performance jumps.

That goes double when you look at one of the cards that Nvidia and AMD introduced later in the GPU shortage at a higher MSRP than their performance would suggest. I recommend to take a look at this handy 3DCenter / VideoCardz graph of how many GPUs should costnormalized against an RTX 3070.

The age of these GPUs may be even more important if you are considering a used GPU as it may be already has worked for those two years and may have even spent time doing forced labor in a cryptocurrency mining rig.

Reportedlya major reason used GPU prices are falling is because crypto miners are flooding the market with cards that are no longer profitable due to the ongoing crypto crash where the total market cap of all crypto assets has fallen by two-thirdss since the $3 trillion high last November. (Miners have been switching GPUs for a while, though.)

Whether it was used for gaming or mining, perhaps buying locally or from a site with good buyer protection – there have been reports of damaged GPUs between the flood. If you get the chance to test, here’s a Gamers Nexus video that can lead you through potential red flags.

Prefer new instead of used? Outside of my Best Buy Founders Edition finds, things aren’t quite so rosy — because you’re dealing with the desire of Nvidia and AMD board partners and retailers to make as much money as possible now that they have inventory to Clear.

In its latest earnings call, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress suggested supply had nearly caught up with demand. “Channel inventory has nearly returned to normal and we expect it to remain around these levels in the second quarter,” Kress said. But sources in the supply chain narrate Digitimes (through VideoCardz) that Nvidia and AMD can now actually have at many cards and try to order fewer new ones from TSMC as they would have overestimated the demand.

Nvidia has reportedly delayed the launches of the RTX 4090, 4080 and 4070 to October, November and December respectively. according to Wccftech and VideoCardz, which could mean that today’s GPUs will no longer be yesterday’s news. But that means it could also take longer for current-generation RDNA 2 or RTX 30-series GPUs to see a price cut.

(Nvidia declined to comment on whether the GPU shortage is over; I await comment from AMD.)

Falcodrin, the GPU fighter I profiled last December, tells me that new GPU prices have been everywhere, and it’s not hard to find evidence of that: Best Buy has third-party RTX 3060 Ti cards in stock that cost significantly more than the more powerful RTX 3070 I had in my cart. If you want to buy a card with a nice cooler for twice the MSRP, you still have plenty of options because a general price drop hasn’t arrived yet.

Instead of drops they still try to attract customers with sales like EVGA’s Anniversary Sale Todaywhere an RTX 3080 can be bought for just $80 above MSRP and both the 3080 Ti and 3090 Ti below MSRP.

Image: Sean Hollister / The Verge

But if you’re the kind of person who will be happy with a current-gen GPU instead of waiting for the next, it sounds like those price cuts are coming. See how some first-party GPUs can be purchased from MSRP, EVGA sales and That 3DCcenter price indexit’s not hard to see room for the rest of the prices to drop.

That said, it depends on gamers noticing that the prizes they’ve been waiting for have finally returned. Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Anshel Sag thinks so. “GPUs are likely to return to normal levels if people who have been putting off building PCs or buying GPUs actually start building them now that prices have returned to reality,” he tells me, adding that “there’s a lot of pent up demand is from real gamers and consumers who have been waiting for the past two years because of the chip shortage, supply chain disruptions and the crypto bubble.”

And while some people are tightening their belts because of inflation or will wait for the next-generation GPU to launch this fall, he doesn’t think they’ll keep gamers away. “You have to remember that for many of these consumers, this is their primary source of entertainment and socialization,” he says, adding that many who would wait for an RTX 40 or RDNA 3 card “understand that the latest and greatest will also be a lot harder to get hold of than what is already available.”

But he agrees that the GPU shortage is now over. The prices speak for themselves.