If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of gamers that are desperate to get their mitts on the newest GPUs coming from Nvidia and AMD, yet are still finding yourself fighting tooth and nail against bots offered by companies, then here is your bad news of the day.

Tariff exclusions for the GPUs have officially ended, and prices have skyrocketed to reflect the additional taxes exerted on the companies thanks to a trade war that continues to take place between the United States and China.

https://twitter.com/dumplingshirara/status/1344044777285664770

The physical stock situation never fully recovered before the tariffs restarted, either, meaning that now people that have suffered from low stocks, cryptocurrency mining, and a plethora of bots are now going to take a higher price right on the chin.

If you’re within the United States, it shouldn’t affect you exponentially; conversely, if you’re outside of the US, your next build just became exponentially higher in a market that already frankly struggles to keep a modicum of sanity during pricing. South Africa had the rare 3080’s that sold at least at double the MSRP of $699 in their currency, as India has similarly suffered.

The companies controlling the export and sale of the GPUs aren’t necessarily looking at leaving an additional few hundred dollars on the table, and the sheer demand in tandem with the supply during a pandemic has wreaked havoc across PC building communities entirely.

It isn’t looking to get any better, either, as cryptocurrency farming looks to once again be on the rise, inflating the costs of components until miners are arguably fighting against themselves for hardware.

https://twitter.com/_bruehl/status/1345310878359576577

The good news is that, if you aren’t hard-pressed to have the bleeding-edge of technology, there is absolutely no harm in waiting for everything to settle before upgrading your PC; drop the settings a little bit and continue to enjoy brand new titles that aren’t locked to specific hardware pieces.

If you’re struggling to render more modern titles, however, some are proposing that opting into the console war isn’t entirely without reason.

Although they are similarly plagued by scalpers, although that situation has slowly been rectifying itself – very slowly.

Thanks to indie developers being the ones that are frankly pushing the industry as a whole into new mechanics, you should have zero problems using an underpowered PC for the next few years: when’s the last time a triple-A title came out that was actually good?