This week’s introduction of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs has coincided with the lowest prices seen on the prior generation of GeForce GPUs in months.
The cryptocurrency boom was good business for GPU makers, sending the cost of years-old GPUs higher than their introductory prices. For end users who weren’t hoping to earn back the price of their purchase by mining cryptocurrency, that means prices become inflated and hard to justify, ultimately increasing the cost of a VR Ready PC.
This week NVIDIA revealed their new GeForce RTX GPUs, which bring real-time ray tracing and AI acceleration to the mix. Along with the cryptocurrency boom dying down, NVIDIA’s prior GTX generation of GPUs have been pushed back down to reasonable prices.
We analyzed prices on Amazon US from the range of NVIDIA’s GTX 10-series VR Ready GPUs and found a consistent downward trend, reaching at or near their lowest prices in months as the announcement of the RTX cards neared. Here’s what we found when looking at MSI’s ‘Gaming’ 10-series cards:
With the RTX cards announced but not actually starting to ship until late September, we expect this trend to continue and for prices to fall still further. We expect there to be a ‘sweet spot’ for low prices between when NVIDIA’s own ‘Founder’s Edition’ RTX cards begin shipping (late September) and the later date when RTX cards from third-party card makers start shipping.
While the RTX cards are capable of bringing some impressive new visuals to traditional games, how effectively their new abilities will translate to improving VR won’t be clear until they hit the streets and we have a chance to put them through the paces. As ever, it will depend heavily on whether or not developers embrace the new rendering capabilities, though NVIDIA appears to be making progress there with some blockbuster titles and major studios committing support.
JJ
And finally everyone complaining about VR being to0 expensive will have a chance now.
jeff courtney
I agree but if it is over expensive the experience is still worth it because it is surreal and nothing like a 2d screen.Playing in vr with motion controls and roomscale is like a disneyland ride.Worth a few extra buck.
JJ
I agree completely :) its so worth it as it is
jeff courtney
Thanks
Get Schwifty!
For decent room scal VR a PC for about $700 give or take, and a set totals about a grand. I bet with some careful selections you could pull the whole thing down to about $750.
NooYawker
No one should complain about costs for first gen devices, they’re for early adopters and are always expensive. They are free to complain about 2nd gen however.
HybridEnergy
Well, the depends on the reasoning and the improvements on the next gen. I think second gen in VR is still going to be quite early adopterish.
Alan Dail
It depends on what you mean by next generation. High end next generation is too expensive for mass adoption. To move out of early adopterish phase VR needs thinks like Oculus Sata Cruz. 6DOF if headset and controllers, no computer or base station required. If they ship that under $500 (the lower the better), and/or someone else (like Apple) does something similar, and it’s powerful enough to run stuff like Beat Saber well, they could sell a ton of them.
JJ
yeah they shouldn’t i agree but they do because theyre lazy unlike all of us :) were good people
Raphael
“were good people”? “theyre lazy”? Not the greatest educayshun I see. Maybe they’re not the only lazy ones.
JJ
are you complaining that i dont have apostrophes? or do you really not get that i was joking?
I feel like you live under a rock with some of your comments.
Raphael
Yeah yeah it was all a joke… At least you know how to use them now flappy.
Sebastian Piotrowski
Raphael, apart from being VR enthusiast I’m also a psychologist. I observe you for some time and it’s not the first time when your post makes me suspect that you suffer from a personality disorder. Your aggression level is way too high – to the point that it bothers you and in result you bother others in order to defuse it. But this sort of unprovoked aggression does not come from too high testosterone level (as you probably like to think…) but is always of psychological origin. Most likely you got hurt in past and your psyche tries to take sort of a “revenge” for this but I don’t want to speculate. Instead I wholeheartedly encourage you to see your local specialist. Living like this makes not only your social surroundings suffer (especially your closest ones – if you still have got any…) but can cause you serious health or legal troubles (especially if you mix it with alcohol or other psychoactive substances). But first of all it makes it impossible for you to be a happy person. If you continue living like this, one day you will understand what I meant and regret it with all your heart but it will be too late… P.S. Of course my post will only fuel your aggression and turn it against me now. That’s ok. Whatever you will write, I’m not going to reply – I just wanted to help you, not to fight you :) Good luck!
Raphael
Well done flappy for observing and diagnosing. The only issue here is that my extreme response (yes it was extremely aggressive) was a direct response to jj reacting in an extreme way to a non-aggressive post earlier in the day on the oculus crystal cove article. So yes, I thought I’d come along and give him back some of his extreme aggression. The irony is that this display of aggression from me was made without any real aggression. It’s just comedy. I suggest you head over the the crystal cove article and look for a comment I posted about oculus releasing only mobile vr for the next 10 years. That’s the point at which jj comes along and goes absolutely mental because he thought I was attacking oculus.
I’m a Psychologist too, and I think your diagnosis here, is pure BULLSHIT.
mirak
Not really because if you compare to flat screens, flat screens are not even a new medium, and it took a lot of time for prices to drop.
Also if you compare to phones, the prices didn’t drop for the high end, it even went higher.
So I think the big brands will do like apple and with the oldest iPhones that are the lowcost solution, and the last product the high end , at a high price.
I see no reason why 2nd gen would be cheaper.
Dave
Small point but I would question that argument today. Oculus Go is pretty cheap, you can get great deals on WMR devices and Rift and Vive HMD’s can be powered with fairly moddest GPU’s I.e. a GTX 1060 which the majority of gamers would have readily available. I have a GTX 1070 and I have a fantastic experience in VR.
JJ
Yeah i agree thats why i wasnt one of the ones complaining about price i was saying that those that do now cannot. I should have been more specific :)
Raphael
“those that do now cannot”?? Still makes no sense. So you think VR gen one is suddenly a mainstream game device because Nvidia releases yet another more expensive GPU? Seriously?
1: Desktop VR HMD is still priced beyond mainstream. I sound negative with that statement but really I’m not. VR has always been on a falling cost curve with rising hardware spec. However, still priced beyond mainstream adoption. HTC haven’t helped in their abandonment of home PC VR users in favour of “pro market”.
2: Octopus CV1 represents the best value for money but it’s still not within range of mainstream adoption.
brandon9271
Oculus should at least done a refreshed CV1.1 like HTC did. Give us better optics or a resolution bump..something. FFS, if HtC can do It then Oculus can too.
Raphael
If Pie does release this year at a price below the overpriced vive “pro” then it will indeed be a lesson for octopusVR. At least they’re doing a lot of R&D for next gen tech like multi plane focus etc. A refreshed rift would be nice certainly if all they have lined-up for this year/next is a crystal cove.
Dave
brandon9271 HTC Vive 1.1 aka the Pro was overpriced and turned out to be a PR disaster. Remember it’s not like we’ll get money off becuase we own CV1. No let them get on with CV2 and it comes when it comes. Santa Cruz is just round the corner anyway although I have major reservations about that unless it can run Rift games it seems pretty pointless now we have the Go…
brandon9271
I was talking about the Vive “mk2” that was smaller and lighter but still basically the same Vive that came before the Pro. I agree though, the Pro was garbage for $800
R FC
Optimisation of software can really leverage existing VR hardware and GPU. John Carmack’s work at Oculus has shown the potential, but it takes real coding skill rather than using off the shelf game engine, like coding for resource limited hardware like Carmack and his contemporaries did back in the day…
Raphael
The positives and negatives of freely available VR game engines.
OctopusVR has some serious engineering/coding talent.
Raphael
What in god’s cock are you talking about? Expecting a 1080ti for 299 are you? When a new gen GPU arrives the previous gen doesn’t drop much for a long time.
Prices have only dropped back to normal high levels post mining craze. VR is still too expensive for most gamers and that isn’t going to change for a few years.
JJ
lol man you do live under a rock and don’t put words or prices in my mouth. come back when you’ve learned a little more and maybe you’ll understand, for now im not going to waste my time explaining things to a simpleton.
Raphael
Alladin Sane.
Sandy Wich
Well idk how much retailers sell them for, but the internet is full of, “more money than common sense”, enthusiasts like me who sell previous best cards for half retail price just to get rid of them when a new gen starts.
Getting a cheap last gen graphic card is easy, you just need to know where to look.
Raphael
Yar, bargains to be had on the used market. I always sell old hardware to offset the cost of new. Sadly I’ve only purchased one used GPU myself and that came with a waterblock and TEC. I think it was a 9800 pro or something. I hated it.
Dave
True apart from the bit about VR being too expiensive – that bits rubbish had you forgotten most people have VR already and probably don’t even know it! But aside from mobile devices, desktop VR you could say is expensive.
brandon9271
I was happily running VR on a PC i built for about $500 before the cryptomining gpu boom. People saying it’s too expensive are exaggerating. Most people interested in PC VR have a gaming PC already
Raphael
I was exaggerating my response in an aggressive way for JJ’s insane trolling on the crystal cove article.: )
Desktop VR is still priced beyond mainstream adoption but it’s still massively cheaper than it was in pre-octopus days. It’s a niche peripheral but people are paying 400 plus for gaming monitors so i would say octopus rift isn’t too far beyond affordable. OctopusVR and Valve have made a determined effort to lower the hardware requirements for driving pc vr.
Andrew Jakobs
A ‘not even’ midrange card like the 1060 (6GB) is still about 280+ euro’s, so I don’t call that cheap…
jeff courtney
My gtx 970 is advanced for me and works fine.I used in vr for years only the 500 series.Couldnt fathom paying up to 1000 for a card.Praise Jesus !
JJ
what! seriously? I used a 970 for vr as well for like 2 months and it was unbearable. I was able to get a glimps of how awesome vr was and that pushed me to get a better card almost immediately. I cannot believe you’re still on a 970 but i’m pretty jealous you’ve gotten it to work well! :)
Plus running games on a 970 shows you who knows how to develop and who doesn’t. Onward and Bullets and more were capable of running on that, while Pavlov was just a brick of crap for efficiency and optimization.
aand Hail Satan.
HybridEnergy
I know Anth from Gamerankings VR has been trucking along on a 970gtx too but there is probably no touching of the super-sampling settings with that card plus don’t bother with the 3k headsets.
JJ
yeah right, I remember Raw Data was a good one too for low ends because they optimize things very well when you turn settings down. The funniest thing ever was when i finaly got my new card only a 1070 and then played raw data, I as waaaayyy more freaked out by robots when they were higher definition and right in your face, it was almost an entirely new game. Plus the fact that I couldn’t see fire or electrical ground damage effects, so before the card I was standing in fire at times and didnt even know it.
FireAndTheVoid
Hail Satan lmao. Will this thread blow up too?
Raphael
Are you 7 years old? “Hail satan”? Trash like you reflects badly on oculus. Back when I started in VR around 2006… it wasn’t in the hands of idiots like you. So the downside of VR heading into mainstream is that it no longer attracts only serious, educated users.
dk
2070 will be around $500
Zach Mauch
Initially, I bet the will drop to $400 or less by the end of the year. Daily price, not deals.
Andrew Jakobs
well, looking at the current generation, it will rather be $599 by the end of the year… But don’t count on the 20xx dropping in price any time soon for at least a whole year, the 10xx will drop slightly in price..
brandon9271
They’re purposely pricing the RTX cards high so they don’t gut the market of existing card. I have a feeling when the benchmarks come out the 20 series isn’t that big of a jump outside of raytracing.
HybridEnergy
Maybe, they should be faster a bit just looking at the mem speed and type. I’m on a 1080ti though so I’m waiting for a 7nm die shrink.
brandon9271
Their presentation was very telling. If it offered some substantial performance jump they wouldn’t have talked about raytracing so much.
Muzufuzo
It offers a substantial performance jump in raytracing, which is very important.
brandon9271
Important to who? Gamers? Nope.
Muzufuzo
You will see in 10 years that it is important to you too.
brandon9271
For sure. My point was, it’s not important now. I’m excited about real-time raytracing for sure but until it’s mainstream in gaming i don’t really see the value in what RTX currently offers.
Muzufuzo
Personally I think Nvidia instead of releasing RT cards in 2018 should wait until a 800$ XX80 Ti can deliver 2160p 60fps with raytracing on (that offers a substantial improvement). Instead of a 1000-1200$ card offering 1080p gaming.
brandon9271
Yeah, and on top of all that it’s supported by about 5 games and some of those are using the RTX for AI instead of graphics
Muzufuzo
21 games supporting RTX including 11 using raytracing. Other RTX innovation is Deep Learning Super Sampling.
HybridEnergy
and no one even knows how fast they really are yet. That’s funny. lol
Zach Mauch
The price drop has everything to do with cryptomining being on the way out and very little to do with the 20 series. If anything, your own provided data process it.
Harold T
Price drop is happening but 1080ti for $400 not yet. RTX 2080 cards and ray tracing is nice and all but who needs it. 1080ti will hold value compared to a $1200 rtx 2080TI. $600 likely not $400
brandon9271
The raytracing will be like PhysX, Hairworks or any other Nvidia only feature that they tell us we must have but only a handful of games support it. Until RT becomes a standard in the industry it’s not much of a selling point. I’m completely underwhelmed with RTX at this point.
jj
no it wont lol raytracing will be the standard soon. if you work in the industry you’d understand this. Pretty much all non-real time rendering is done via ray-tracing now too because it has sooo many benefits. You shoulnd’t make such solid claims if you don’t understand the tech.
brandon9271
I know EXACTLY what raytracing is. Is it in any way the standard in gaming/ real-time rendering in any form or fashion? NO. Will it be in the next few year? NO. Why should anybody buy an RTX GPU when no game supports it’s features? People are still playing on dX9 cards ffs. Trust me, I’m excited about this. It’ll be the next major step towards photorealism. However, until we see AMD doing it and until it’s in a game console it’s just another optional feature like I said.
JJ
If you kow what raytracing is then youd have a different opinion. Some of the things yous aid were right about it not being the standard but you were wrong about it becoming the standard. Raytracing is nothing like sli or PhysX, it will actually come int play on all gpus in the future and will be the gaming standard. again if u knew ray-tracing then you wouldn’t say those stupid things.
brandon9271
Try refuting some the points i made in my previous comment since my reply would simply be repeating myself. K? Thanks
Raphael
Are you saying you work in the industry? That’s a scary thought flappy. Given your somewhat basic grasp of writin, grandma and punctuation.
Raphael
Pretty much. SLI was good in the percentage of games it worked in. Physx was also good for the small percentage of games it worked in. VRworks brings big performance increase to VR games for the SMALL percentage of games that support it. Now SLI is dying and a new tech will replace it. Yet another forthcoming poorly adopted brand specific tech. Real-time RT is the future but on a brand specific GPU? No. Nvidia lack the skills to really push their features into the forefront and keep it there. OctopusVR is an example of a company who did it right. Developed, educated, put the hardware in the hands of developers in a big way. Nvidia don’t know how to push their GPU features in a longterm sustainable way. I’m surprised CUDA is still a thing to be honest.
brandon9271
Nvidia’s problem is greed. None of these brand specific feature ever take hold. Look at GSync. I get it, Nvidia developers all these cool things and they want to capitalize on it. However, none of these things take hold until they’re standardized.
Sandy Wich
Nvidia are the lords of bullshit, I’ve been buying all these cards since the dawn of these companies and nobody’s done more ass-mouthing than them. It blows me away they have so much of the consumer hardware market in their grasp right now, it’s truly a testament to how easy it is to manipulate people and turn them into fanboys.
brandon9271
I usually fall for it but not this time. I was excited about all the VRworks features but of course they weren’t utilized by anyone. It’s not necessarily Nvidia’s fault that more developers don’t utilize features like PhysX though. However, they are to blame for telling us we NEED a feature that’s only supported by 5 games
Sandy Wich
Tons of marketing that doesn’t mean shit for consumers, continuation of rebranded x80 series as the TI/TITAN and additions that sound epic on paper, “6x the raytracing performance”, but is completely pointless as by the time it’s actually used in mainstream games that card generation will be extinct.
Nvidia. Please invest in AI and buy our future self-driving cars.
George Isaacs
Upvoted both comments as it’s 23 days later and I don’t see prices that low, yet. At the same time, I can, and will wait.
Harold T
Still think it’s nuts the Video card costs more than the rest of the computer. $750 1080TI is a screamer but that’s a lot of cash. bought a certified dell XPS i5-6400 with GTX 1070 8gb + 480SSD and runs all VR stuff really including SkyrimVR for $800
Zachary Scott Dickerson
Oh, the GXT1080ti is almost the price it was when I bought it 1.5 years ago! I remember when video cards used to drop 30% in price per year.
Sandy Wich
Ever stop to think how your 1080ti is just a rebranded x80 series with a new fancy name, then they added a bunch of pointless ram then doubled the price?
…I remember the good old days, before the TI/TITAN scam came along.
Jerald Doerr
I don’t know if that’s true… + Pascal and you need the extra video ram if you want to play in 4k
Get Schwifty!
LOL – the 1080 is about a +32% bump over a 980…. sometimes higher…. not sure what you mean by “rebranded”…. that extra ram is very handy for supersampling and higher res or ultrawides, etc…. far from just a rebranding…
Jerald Doerr
Yeah, I’m totally confused by his statement.. I replayed 3 days ago and deleted it because I thought he might of meant 10x series… Theres no way in hell you can sugest a 1080 is rebranded from a 980.. Ahhh Pascal, Clock, “useless?” RAM, NOOOOO (need that for 4k dude) even calling a 1080Ti rebranded 1080 is ridiculous…1 1080Ti is faster than 2 of my 1080’s
Andrew Jakobs
Weird, as I haven’t seen a real drop in price (maybe a couple of euro’s) of the 1060 cards I’ve been following for the last couple of months..
Another reason is that, as I’ve read in an interview with AMD, the cryptocurrency bubble is deflating…
oompah
1060 was less than 250$ earlier so if gets lesser than that, I’d consider it happening
brubble
Lowest price in months? Big deal. Prices are still a gouge….still above original msrp….for 2 year old hardware…..that has one foot in the grave. For myself the 10XX series is no longer worth considering in the slightest.
Baldrickk
Am I the only one cursing those graphs for being useless? It looks like the 1080 had a massive drop in price, but was only ~$50, the 1080ti looks like a similar drop over a longer time but it was ~$200 from beginning of the graph or ~$300 from the peak price…
The graphs need a 0 point and same scale axis.
grabma
I don’t know why there are a few people being happy but these prices are still stupid high for entry. In fact they are still higher than when the 900’s released at original MSRP. Hardware for VR TECHNICALLY has gotten more expensive the past 1.5 years. This isn’t an improvement still.
