After the end of the semiconductor shortage, there was a rapid drop in demand for video cards - as a result, prices for GDDR6 memory fell sharply. According to 3DCenter.org, over the past 1.5 years, it has fallen in price by 75%, and today 8 GB of GDDR6 on the spot market is estimated at $27.
Back in February last year, the 6 Gb (8 GB) GDDR1 chip cost about $13 on the spot market, but today its price is only $3,364, which gives about $27 per 8 GB. Major manufacturers of video cards, of course, do not buy memory on the spot market - they have more lucrative long-term contracts with companies such as Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix. And they can't buy the first chip they come across - the choice depends on the suppliers of graphics processors represented by AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, and the supported components are built into the firmware.
Sales of video cards began to decline from the first quarter of last year, giving rise to a drop in demand for GDDR6, but this did not prevent AMD and NVIDIA from equipping the Radeon RX 7600 and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti models in the middle price category with a modest 8 GB of memory. NVIDIA is also preparing a 16 GB version - $100 more expensive, without the reference version of the Founders Edition, and you will have to wait until July. And $ 27 in the spot market doubles in retail, that is, a video card with 16 GB of memory is more expensive by about $ 54. In addition, the indicated price is valid for 8 Gb chips, and a modern graphics card needs 16 Gb (2 GB) components to get 8 GB on a 128-bit interface with just four chips. But it's probably reasonable to assume that the prices of 16Gbps chips are broadly in line with the prices of the 8Gbps models.
So it turns out that 16 GB of memory on a video card turns out to be an expensive pleasure even at modest spot prices, especially when manufacturers are expected to offer democratic offers. On models with a price tag of up to $300 like the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, the amount of memory in 8 GB is more economically justified, although it is difficult for such video cards to compete with more expensive models.
Finally, it is worth considering one more point. AMD and NVIDIA probably made design decisions regarding GPUs Navi 33 and AD106/AD107, respectively, back in 2020, when the demand for video cards was only growing, and with it the prices for GDDR6, so the choice fell on the 128-bit bus. This helped save die space, and 8GB of memory became the standard configuration for mid-range graphics. A lot has changed since then: with the price of GDDR6 and GDDR6X falling, AMD and NVIDIA can offer the consumer more modest recommended retail prices for products on the level of the Radeon RX 7600 and GeForce RTX 4060. With the high prices of the latest generation GPU, double the amount of memory is quite an acceptable option, but in practice it is rather an exception, as is the case with the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. The rule is still the installation of 16 GB of memory on both sides of the printed circuit board, only in other price categories.
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