It is a mantra that NVIDIA's RTX 4000 series has not sold much and is not flying off the shelves. If the RTX 4060 is collecting dust because no one wants it, and NVIDIA is doing RTX 4000 Super to relaunch unsuccessful models. Shouldn't the prices of the RTX 4090 and so on be reduced?
Well it turns out not. While one may think that they have lowered prices because it was better to wait, it turns out that The prices of an RTX 4090 have risen on average more than 700 US dollars above its recommended retail price.
It was not worth waiting to see if the prices of an RTX 4090 would drop
According to the Extremetech portal, the prices of the RTX 4090 have been rising little by little. Added to that is that You can barely find units in stock, possibly because it is the graphics card that best reproduces the ray traced games.
They gave as an example that Amazon, the only card available is the Zotac AMP Extreme, which costs 2.267 US dollars, 700 US dollars above the recommended retail price. Of course, it is an overclocked model. There are more cards in stock on Newegg, but they are all over $2.200.
At Best Buy, the only place where Founders Edition model cards are usually found, they do not have a single RTX 4090 in stock. They also cannot be purchased at Microcenter available for shipping. B&H Photo has a full line of RTX 4090 cards on their website, but none in stock.
The situation seems to be due to US sanctions against China, which prevent the country from acquiring high-end GPUs and AI accelerators from Nvidia and its competitors. In anticipation of this event, the country's inhabitants could have bought all the RTX 4090s they could get their hands on, possibly causing the current drought. There have also been reports of people repurposing RTX 4090 for data center workloads, as it is the most powerful GPU they could buy given the sanctions, so it will have to do.
