Nvidia RTX 3080 price cut may suggest more RTX 4000 GPUs coming soon
Best Buy is slashing prices on all its RTX 3000 series Ampere graphics cards
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Bye bye Ampere
🏷️ Best Buy has cut prices across the RTX 3000 lineup
😞 Sadly, a lot of the inventory is sold out online
🚚 This usually happens when new graphics cards are on the way
⏱️ Does this mean an RTX 4060 Ti or RTX 4070 is imminent?
The last graphics card released by Nvidia was the RTX 4070 Ti, an excellent high-end option for anyone not wanting to fork over more than a thousand bucks for the RTX 4080. However, it’s by no means the end of the line for the new best GPUs, as we’re expecting Nvidia to release an RTX 4060 Ti soon. And now that Best Buy is slashing prices across the whole RTX 3000 lineup, does this mean more RTX 4000 graphics cards are on the way?
Right now, the RTX 3080 is listed as “Clearance” and will apparently only set you back $419. That is, it would if it wasn’t currently sold out. That makes sense for a graphics card that basically already has a next-gen counterpart, but if you look at the RTX 3060 Ti, only the Gigabyte Ventus model is available, sitting at $484. The rest of the models are listed as “Clearance” or seeing heavy discounts unusual for graphics cards this popular.
This doesn’t really tell us anything about what Nvidia is planning for its upcoming graphics cards, so of course it’s all speculation. But, with all the rumors about the RTX 4060 Ti and recently even the non-Ti RTX 4070 showing up in leaks, all the cards are starting to line up.
Current rumors about the RTX 4060 Ti point to a ~200W graphics card with fewer CUDA cores than the RTX 3060 Ti, though it’s built on the much more efficient Ada Lovelace architecture.
When other graphics cards launched in the RTX 4000 series, we saw Nvidia continue to sell the last-gen versions of each card. For most people, the 3000 series was more in line with their budget. But it looks like that’s all about to change, with the RTX 3080 being completely unavailable at one of the biggest tech retailers in the US.
Everything seems to be falling into place for new graphics cards, but my hope is that future Ada Lovelace GPUs will carry more affordable price tags, especially if Nvidia is going to stop selling the older, and cheaper, options.