I guess we expect that at some point RAM prices will start going back (close) to "normal", right? but what about GPUs?
Posted by relmny@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 77 comments
I'm trying to refrain my self from buying an, extremely expensive, RTX 5090 FE (I don't really need it, but... I want one), because... it's extremely expensive ATM, and I was thinking "I just wait a few months hoping for prices to go down".
But then I started thinking "will they?"
As local is becoming extremely good and some governments/companies look like they are almost pushing for local with their actions/statements... maybe prices won't come down.
I know nobody knows... but might that happen? prices not going down for years? or actually keep increasing a bit?
Bootes-sphere@reddit
GPU prices are tough. Historically they stay elevated longer than RAM because demand from gaming, AI, and crypto keeps pushing them. That said, if you're doing local inference, you might explore whether you actually need the 5090 FE specifically. Plenty of people get solid results with older cards (4090, 3090 Ti) running quantized models, or they layer API calls for heavier workloads.
RoomyRoots@reddit
GPUs have been fucked since Crypto. Unless new players start targetting consumers, we are fucked. Nvidia doesn't care and I 100% believe AMD is self-nerfing. I don't have much hope for Intel's division too. Apple is a walled-garden and I would rather not depend on their ecosystem.
ThisGonBHard@reddit
It depends on if/how the bubble will burst.
Sadly, inflation will destroy any hope of affordability IMO.
You might see 90 class going back down to MSRP at 2k USD. But I dont expect us to have even 48 GB, let alone 64 or 96 like the PRO 6000.
sn2006gy@reddit
The bubble could burst tomorrow, and that wouldn't fix the demand - it would just move from massive companies to everyone fighting for the hardware for themselves.
kmouratidis@reddit
AMD reported record earnings yesterday, most cloud and AI companies (maybe except OpenAI and Oracle) have been killing it, most big companies do not plan to limit AI expenditure in any way, and "AI bubble" talk has been going for 3 years now (started mid-2023, but spiked ~6M ago, based on Google Trends), and recent LLMs (open & closed, small & large) have shown great improvements. At this rate, if a "burst" does happen, the drop would not even fall below 2023/2024 valuations when the bubble talk started.
JayPSec@reddit
I agree here, I think there's a big misunderstanding between OpenAI bubble and AI bubble. Believing the AI bubble is the same as saying we're all nut jobs refreshing this sub every couple of hours. This is the future, regardless if it is OpenAI or CoolOpenSourceChineseAI that takes the prize. Drawing the parallel to Uber, it had a few competitors but none of them as strong as they are, OpenAI thought (thinks?) that eventually they'll win out but it simply isn't better than their competitors, they do rule in AI slop and sycophancy, and it made some really big investments/promises that will bite them in the ass. But the AI movement grows massively, in terms of usage, applications, research. To think this will just stop is plain wishful thinking.
ContextLengthMatters@reddit
Nah. It would move from some companies to other companies.
Makers7886@reddit
not to mention the robot worker race heating up, reminds me of llms a few years back.
i312i@reddit
People/companies are becoming addicted to AI, there will be no bubble burst, only technical advancement that may move hardware demand elsewhere.
ParaboloidalCrest@reddit
This. Tech advancements 1-2 decades ago were able to beat inflation, but it's not the case anymore.
datbackup@reddit
I’m unwilling to pay reddit for whatever award thing so please take this emoji in recognition of your comment, most insightful in the thread🥇
ParaboloidalCrest@reddit
Thank you! It belongs to u/ThisGonBHard but I'll take it!
Express_Living2264@reddit
there's way to many companies making money with it now. Some will go bankrupt/ bought out. But i doubt the mass exodus event will happen.
Loose_Object_8311@reddit
Welcome to the new normal.
perhaps_too_emphatic@reddit
lol no. The thing about most inflation is that once people get used to higher prices, vendors continue to charge them.
It would take a back stock of chips for prices to drop to there they were before. They will go down some, but I doubt much.
Tagedieb@reddit
I wouldn't even bet on RAM prices coming down this year. Seems we will have higher demand for some time now, and I read capacity takes years to increase.
lemondrops9@reddit
I thought Nvidia paused customer Gpu production until close to 2027. That said Ive only seen 20% increase over last year for the 5060ti 16GB.
SnooPaintings8639@reddit
Don't count on it. GPUs are "going back to normal" since a bit over decade now. There is lots of local AI enthusiasts who are keep on waiting, with lots and lots of PC gamers right after them in queue.
This is just the world we live in now, compute is expensive.
Zeeplankton@reddit
Probably a pointless addendum: compute is expensive, but it's more they know the value now, and how it has infinite leverage. So yeah I'm in camp never going down to normies lol. It's not just AI now; it's whatever comes after.
Only world things coming back down to sanity is years down the line; and maybe Huawei takes over most inference.
Monkeylashes@reddit
Until there is a market disruption. China is building GPUs and it is likely the rein of CUDA will diminish over time if these things are priced competitively
relmny@reddit (OP)
That's our last hope (like with local LLMs!!!), but seeing that ppl, like me, still look for the most expensive CUDA crap, while there are ADM and Intel... I don't know how long that would take, after they (if) release a competitive GPU.
darktotheknight@reddit
If AMD would make good GPUs, I would buy them. The 9700 32GB is nice, but it's 1500€ right now, while the 9070 16GB is a mere 550€. I don't think it's worth that money. Plus, the 9700 AI Pro is only available with a blower-style cooler, while e.g. Nvidia's top end is also available with axial coolers.
Where are the 48GB, 64GB and 96GB RDNA4 workstation cards? Where is GDDR7? The RDNA3 carda are nice, but they don't support FP8 and current focus is on RDNA4 anyway.
Not to mention whatever sorry mess ROCm is: they "officially" don't support any consumer RDNA2 GPUs, while they still release brand new products in 2026 w/ RDNA2 (e.g. 9850X3D and 9950X3D2 iGPUs). They dropped support for MI50 and Radeon VII. No one wants to heavily invest in AMD, if they don't get proper, long-term support. I bought my 3090 Ti for 800€ 2 years ago, which I can now sell for 1100€. Did your RX6900 also increase in value? I don't think so.
DSrcl@reddit
China is not gonna tape out good chips any time soon
Ell2509@reddit
China also has export bans on their chips. Ram, gpu, don't matter. China has ot locked down, and they have all the domestic consumers they need to make thay work for them.
Due-Memory-6957@reddit
Maybe they'll change it once they have produced enough for themselves? I was recently looking into get solar energy in my house, and what would you know, it was made by Huawei
redditorialy_retard@reddit
Pls entire subreddit is powered 80% by China and 20% Chinese effect
Badger-Purple@reddit
They’re pushing LPDDR5 on those…for now.
relmny@reddit (OP)
yeah, that's what I started to think lately... thanks!
darktotheknight@reddit
To be honest, what is "normal"? Before everyone wanted to buy 5090, the ROG Astral 5090 was 2799€ MSRP. Now I can buy one for 3500€. That is "only" 25% more expensive. If you look at the RTX 5000 Pro, it went from 4200€ to about 4700€, or RTX 6000 Pro from 7800€ to about 9200€.
If you compare this with the wild Corona years, you get a different picture: the 1699€ MSRP MSI 3090 sold for 3500€, which was twice (!) over MSRP. Your bread and butter ASUS RTX 3070 at 669€ MSRP was listed around 1500€ - 1800€.
So, if "normal" for you is ROG Astral at 2799€, then yes, I believe the prices will come down. The current spike in GPU prices is due to memory shortage, which will eventually get sorted. The production is being ramped up and we will see the effects on the market somwhen mid/late 2027 or early 2028. Also, breakthroughs like TurboQuant and MTP lower the raw compute power demands (think hyperscale), as well as the initial AI hype is slowing down. I think the effects of these will be seen on the market much sooner, maybe end of 2026 or early 2027.
Unknown factors, such as the launch of DGX Station w/ 784GB total memory, AMD RDNA5/XDNA/Venice and Nvidia Rubin/RTX 60 series launches (+ whatever Google/Amazon are cooking), and possibly more breakthroughs in LLM research, can affect the market in an unseen way. Late 2026 - 2028 will be very interesting in that regard, as we will see for the first time, what hardware will look like, which was purposefully designed for AI/LLM from the very first second.
cutter89locater@reddit
Right now there are shortages of every related material. I don't think price goes down soon.
Computer hardware has become a luxury like cars, used market has value.
Fab/factory (hardware production) takes years with hundreds of people involved.
But might be tomorrow night, one guy in the basement find out a more efficient way of training/inferencing.
"I'm limited by the technology of my wallet" XD
stoppableDissolution@reddit
Idk, I kinda doubt it. I ended up buying 6000 pro and eyeing yet_another_3090 (and, probably, another 9600x and 48gb of ram and a good mobo) because I feel like we are up for shortages of all silicon as api prices go up and companies start to seriously look into local compute.
relmny@reddit (OP)
I was (am?) considering a 5000 pro (48gb) which goes for about 20% more than the 5090, but as I also game with this computer, the 5090 will be an upgrade from my 4080 super, and from a 5000 pro on that regard... but, yeah, a 6000 pro is a dream...
justan0therusername1@reddit
I feel like I’m seeing more and more places looking at local more for privacy but token cost subsidies going away will def push that harder
zhdc@reddit
I placed a corporate purchase for 9x RTX 3090s in early 2021. Five years later, they’re still worth half of what we paid for them (Europe).
Meanwhile, the latest and greatest data center hard drive now has as much storage capacity as our entire 24 bay storage server, which we purchased at the same time. It wasn’t cheap.
ProfessionalSpend589@reddit
This topic is covered by all major tech sites.
They seem to have made good predictions until now and their next warning is that we may see CPU shortages too.
relmny@reddit (OP)
thanks, I don't read tech sites, but asking qwen, with web search on, also says that prices won't likely come down and might even increase.
MrBeforeMyTime@reddit
This is a supply and demand problem. AI demand is greater than ever right now, so don't expect Ram/GPU/Computer parts to be in large supply or cheap prices. It will only drop if one of two things happen. Some architecture/technological innovation changes the way AI works so you don't need as much ram. Or the demand for AI drops so much it's no longer profitable to buy large amounts of Ram. Until one of these two things happen, the prices will stay high.
Most-Trainer-8876@reddit
"Some architecture/technological innovations to reduce ram usage" -> this increase the need for more ram not reduce. When efficiency improve, usage increases more!
And demand for AI won't drop. It will only increase...
So none will happen.
MrBeforeMyTime@reddit
Your statement is assuming that the demand is limitless and that the medium is the same. If, for example, someone finds a way to run AI on an insect brain the demand for insects will go up, but not RAM. Also, if there is some advancement that makes AI 10 billion times more efficient, but there is only 100 million times more demand, RAM prices will still drop.
Most-Trainer-8876@reddit
Your 'efficiency outpaces demand' scenario would require an unprecedented and historically unprecedented divergence from every tech adoption pattern we've ever seen
thread-e-printing@reddit
Have you considered sparing us your hysterical bullshit and learning economics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
MrBeforeMyTime@reddit
I wish you were able to comprehend the article you posted. I am aware of the paradox. Obviously, there is a limit to the possible increase in demand because otherwise the paradox would imply the demand would be infinite in a world of finite resources.
As I said before, there are certain breakthroughs that can occur that would lower the demand for ram, not increase it. Read what I said above slowly and carefully before replying again.
LeonidasTMT@reddit
There is another constraint is that we will just make even bigger models.
MrBeforeMyTime@reddit
Bigger models are only needed for the current version of AI. Human brains run on far less energy than even the smallest models that we have. If we have more efficient world models in the future, the demand for RAM can still go down.
MarcusAurelius68@reddit
Without luck this innovation will be like crypto and suddenly make GPUs useless.
Harbor733@reddit
High end GPUs will no longer cater to the regular consumer.
Terminator857@reddit
I'm not optimistic about GPU prices coming down. I'm more optimistic about being able to accomplish good things with integrated graphics. With multi token prediction speeding things up by 3x, and possibly other improvements we could get decent performance.
Monad_Maya@reddit
That'll make cloud subscriptions even cheaper, no?
That certainly won't help with local LLM adoption when online APIs are nearly free.
Most people IRL don't care enough about privacy.
Monad_Maya@reddit
Get an R9700 Pro (or two) and call it a day unless you need CUDA.
NNN_Throwaway2@reddit
Consumer hardware is dying. We'll be lucky if its even possible to buy consumer GPUs at any price in a couple of years.
jacek2023@reddit
On Reddit, people are often delusional, and they believe in things like UBI. In the real world, there are rules, like the laws of gravity or the laws of economics. Prices go up when people want to buy something and there is a shortage of that thing on the market. We can hope that companies will increase production or that demand will decline, but I don’t see that happening soon.
thread-e-printing@reddit
Games aren't real. Value is a game. All games are unnecessary by definition. Just because it's enforced by the thugs of the Epstein class doesn't make that any less so.
ParaboloidalCrest@reddit
100%
mohelgamal@reddit
They will come down because right now there is a very big build out to increase chip production capacity, not just in the US but also in China
When will the prices come down is the big question, this may take years, but may be much sooner if AI deployment datacenters gets bottlenecked by energy supply. I read somewhere that We don’t really have near enough the energy required to power the chips we currently have under contract and gas turbines, nuclear reactors, etc are several years coming. Solar is the fastest way but it is constrained by the large area required
mechkbfan@reddit
I suspect about 2-3 years, as I think we're going to see a few things play out
Are they worth $500+ billion? Probably not.
In a few years you'd expect these AI companies to be making $25 billion or so in profit
That's a lot of profit AFTER paying for initial CapEx of land purchase, building the data centers & hardware, as well as ongoing OpEx of staff, electricity, water, repayments, R&D, etc.
Let's say you can get away with charging enough that each customer is $1,000 profit.
For $25 billion in profit, that's 250 million customers.
Of course each may target different markets.
e.g. Maybe my employer might be willing to fork out $10k/year in AI for developers, but how many would?
With rates going out, repayments on these billion dollar loans need to be made AND investors are going to want to see some returns, they're going to start getting squeezed.
Once these all align, that's when I expect the AI bubble to pop, and prices to plummet as AI companies no longer hoarding RAM shipments as they try to maximise their profitability of existing setups.
jobgh@reddit
Never. Although I expect gaming to filter down to use last gen GPUs, while AI takes the cutting edge chips
Badger-Purple@reddit
2028
JohnToFire@reddit
A few days ago Dylan patel said he thought memory prices would double again. I am concerned not just about when Claude and chatgpt subs cost are parity to api, but when they have to jack up prices due to shortages relative to demand given the huge value.
datbackup@reddit
yes, as someone who has lived through real mania bubbles, we are still in the “this is annoying i’m gonna go complain online” phase. We have not yet reached the “i’m questioning my life decisions because i didn’t buy during the phase when everyone was saying the bubble will pop soon”
jacobpederson@reddit
That's not how prices work. They might go down a little, but even IF the AI bubble bursts prices are high for good now :*(
grimjim@reddit
It's going to take more than a few months. Nvidia is apparently bringing back the RTX 3060 as a cope.
ea_man@reddit
Well the last bump was because business like OpenAI made outrageous orders like 40% production of all RAM, the moment those should prove un impractical the situation may change, actually prices for GPU were going down slowly before last November.
Yet I would not count on that, it turns out now even more people is using AI so I guess the next craze will be on consumer GPU and cheaper hw for people that want to do inference at home without paying a subscription.
Dho, a 9070xt went from 610 in November to 730 and now back to 660 in Europe so they are going down but this roller coaster has proved that it can go both up and down. I'm afraid it's a VC money problem, if those USA AI firms thake a serious hit with their IPO (which they should) I guess the datacenters craze in USA should slow down and so the prices.
Morphon@reddit
Well, the problem right now is that we have highly constrained manufacturing for silicon (both for compute and memory). People forget that the 5080 would be PROFITABLE for Nvidia at $850. They would have made money on the 5090 at $1200. If they could produce enough of them, why wouldn't they? But they can't. TSMC on the compute side, and the big-3 RAM manufacturers simply can't make enough for the demand RIGHT NOW.
That, by definition, is temporary. Demand for compute isn't unlimited, same for memory. It will take time before the market reaches equilibrium.
We all need to hope for a "soft" bubble burst scenario. Otherwise suddenly the RAM manufacturers can't move their HBM chips and potentially stop build-out of new factories, or even worse, go under themselves. You could say "serves them right" but either way, the consumer loses in that scenario. Same for Nvidia. You don't want them to have the "hard" bubble pop and them unable to produce anything.
But reaching balance between consumer, enthusiast, and datacenter is going to take a little bit longer. Maybe another year or two.
Just hold on to what you have and enjoy that. It's not the right time to buy computer gear unless absolutely necessary. Buy other stuff instead. 😄
ttkciar@reddit
They will come down eventually, but I don't think they'll get back down to 2025 prices until 2029'ish.
KURD_1_STAN@reddit
They will literally never go down to those prices. The best outcome will be half of as it is now
ttkciar@reddit
"Never" is a very, very long time. I doubt any of us can say what prices will be like twenty years from now, and "never" is even further away than that.
Hydroskeletal@reddit
I'm pretty bearish on RAM prices normalizing any time soon. Even if supply ramps up the demand is very pent up. Prices won't feel pressure until that demand is met.
Kodix@reddit
I wouldn't count on it, barring huge social upheaval (which likely wouldn't make them cheaper either, tbh).
Compute is getting *more* useful, not less.
cantgetthistowork@reddit
My 3090s are worth MORE than the prices I bought them in 2021. GPU prices will never come down.
a_beautiful_rhind@reddit
They're not making any more DDR4 and upgrading is much more expensive now. So even that is not going down.
GPUs have more and more uses. As others said already, inflation doesn't help. We're boned.
chafey@reddit
It is very unlikely that prices will drop ever - they will likely continue to go up due to the world becoming increasingly dangerous, unstable and divided. nVidia isn't planning to release a new consumer GPU for at least 18 months so you will get quite a bit of use out of it.
species__8472__@reddit
It depends on what gpus.
The 5090 will maintain its value even after AI. There are plenty of other use cases for large vram cards. 3D modeling, video editing high resolution videos with a ton of effects especially noise reduction, etc.
The 8gb and 12gb cards are far less appealing to non gamers, the problem is that gamers want more vram than 8/12gb as well.
fredastere@reddit
It will never go back down to what it was. Never
tat_tvam_asshole@reddit
The quantitative easing will continue until morale improves.
BitGreen1270@reddit
Your desire to purchase an expensive gpu is thanks to social network i.e. reddit. Mainly because you see so many people with brilliant builds and systems. Don't hold your breath for prices to fall. Going to be a while. Maybe if Google tpus take off and Huawei GPUs become widely available and amd has comparable GPUs with high vram.
Majinsei@reddit
2 años~
Eso es lo mínimo siendo optimistas~
Probablemente más a futuro~
Yo me compraré la de AMD, es solo inferencia para mí así que puedo soportarlo~
Long_comment_san@reddit
I expect some radical new tech to pop up in the next 2 years related to memory. Perhaps we learn to cram a lot more memory on a chip or something like that.
The fact that we're not getting 3.5 or 4gb GDDR7 chips by now tells me that there is some bullshittery going on. There's literally no way we sit on 3gb GDDR7 chips for a couple of years now with zero public progress on developing anything past that point. I bet there's one or two techs that can go into production in 3 months but not being released because no one needs the demand to drop - the demand is very good and zero need to kick it.