GPUs Crawled Back to MSRP Just in Time for Memory to Undo It
For a stretch in late 2025 the GPU market behaved the way buyers had been asking it to: in-stock listings up, average premiums collapsing, and every current card except one finally available somewhere near its sticker price. That window was real and it was measurable. It was also almost certainly the last good one for a while, because the thing that made it possible was already reversing.
The improvement was not cosmetic. Between June and late November, the combined average premium across in-stock cards fell from 27.8% over MSRP to 10.7%, and the number of listings sold at MSRP went from 13 to 58. What makes it worth examining closely is that the recovery had obvious causes, and every one of them was temporary.
The Improvement Was Broad, Not Cosmetic
Nearly every current-generation card got cheaper. The RX 9070 XT fell from an average of $837 to about $655, a drop over 20%, which put it below its own $729 launch average for the first time. The RTX 5080 shed $155 to $1,360, and the 5070 Ti dropped $130 to $820. Intel improved most in percentage terms: the B580 went from $344 to $264 and the B570 landed exactly on its $220 MSRP.
Availability moved with it. Total in-stock listings climbed from 135 to 171, and the 9070 XT went from 3 of 15 models in stock to 12 of 14. Some of that was AMD pricing the 9070 GRE at the same $550 as the better non-GRE 9070, which forced partners to hold the lower number. Some of it was one overpriced seller's Battlemage listings disappearing, which by itself dragged Intel's average most of the way back to normal.
That second detail is the useful lesson. In a category with nine models total, a single inflated seller can define the entire average. Thin markets are easy to distort in both directions, so a dramatic improvement in a small category is often a change in who is listing rather than a change in what anything costs.
One Card Didn't Participate
The RTX 5090 was the only card to rise, up about $50, and even its four cheapest in-stock listings averaged $1,100 over a $2,000 MSRP. That is the entire argument for high-end competition in one data point. When nobody else fields a card above 16GB, the price stops tracking market conditions and simply holds.
The near-MSRP cards tell the other half of the story, and it is less flattering. The 8GB 5060 Ti's MSRP sits slightly above what it actually sells for. The 8GB 9060 XT sat 2.9% over. Neither is generosity — these are the SKUs buyers decline, and when demand collapses the premium collapses with it. MSRP is not a floor the industry respects. It is a ceiling that only holds where somebody still wants the card.
Two Changes Already in the Pipeline
The first is structural. Reports say NVIDIA will stop bundling memory with its GPUs, leaving board partners to source VRAM themselves. Partners will not get better rates than NVIDIA does, so the likely result is compressed partner margins, a wider advantage for Founders Edition cards, and a street price that climbs faster than the die cost can justify.
The second is a straight increase. AMD has reportedly notified channel partners of a roughly 10% jump across the full lineup on memory costs, and it would be the company's second such move this cycle. Both companies are also sliding their next refreshes, which removes the one scheduled event that historically resets pricing downward.
Put those together and the arithmetic is unpleasant. Current prices are probably the best of the next several quarters, and they are being quoted off inventory that was bought before the increases landed. The market is not about to get worse because demand spiked. It is about to get worse because the input costs finally reach the shelf.
What I Think
The five-month improvement was not a trend. It was a lag — inventory ordered during a soft spring arriving into a market that had stopped bidding. Anyone who read it as the beginning of a normalised GPU market got the direction right and the duration badly wrong, and the people who sat out waiting for further drops are the ones now paying a memory premium on top of a partner premium.
My advice is unromantic. If you need a card and you can find one within a few percent of MSRP, take it, because the discount is a residual, not a policy. If you are upgrading for entertainment, don't — your current card is worth more today than it will be in six months, which is a strange sentence to write about computer hardware and an accurate one.
The card to watch is the 5090, precisely because it never joined the recovery. If its cheapest listing ever gets within $500 of MSRP, the shortage is genuinely easing. If it holds, then the next generation launches higher and every tier below it gets dragged up with it. That single number is a better forecast than any roadmap leak.