We're all for Nvidia lowering the price of its latest RTX 40 series graphics cards. We have already seen the green team reduce the prices of both the RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) and RTX 4080 (opens in new tab) in the UK and Europe - ostensibly due to exchange rate changes, but now there are more extensive There are rumors that modifications may be in the works.

And Lord knows it needs it.

Rumors coming out of China (via TechRadar (open in new tab)) claim that a price adjustment will take place in mid-December, around the same time AMD launches the $899 RX 7900 XT and $999 RX 7900 XTX (open in new tab) cards. But the two are unrelated. Apparently. And we assume that it will be on top of the price reductions in the exchange rate over the past few days.

The original MSRP in the UK and Europe was higher than the dollar value in the US, but has finally come down to at least parity here in the UK. That means the RTX 4090 is now £1,599 and the RTX 4080 £1,199 (opens in new tab). These are the new MSRPs for Founders Edition cards on the Nvidia online store, and both cards are sold out.

However, if you look around at regular retailers, you can find both GPUs in stock, which is not the case with Board Partner cards. If you're willing to pay; the RTX 4090 card is still a spectacularly bad deal at over $3,000 (open in new tab) in some places, but the RTX 4080 is easier to get without going to the odd third-party store and is much closer to MSRP.

In fact, we found Palit's RTX 4080 for under the new price of £1,200 (opens in new tab) in the UK.

Much has been said about this GPU in the weeks since its launch. The fact is that, as has happened with literally every graphics card launch in the past few years, the cards quickly disappeared from sale and were never seen again except by eBay rip-off merchants. One could argue that this is good news and a sign of a robust supply chain that keeps cards in and out of stock across channels, but it is more likely a sign that things are not going so well for the second-ranked Ada Lovelace GPU.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that Nvidia's own statement that they are "under-shipping" (open in new tab) indicates that the combination of cards in short supply and enough chips left in the channel to buy right now are not selling as well as expected.

"We have under-shipped the game at this point," CFO Colette Kress says at a recent technical conference.

Kress predicts that will no longer be the case by the end of the fourth quarter. 'There will be a balance between sell-through and sell-in,' she said. And they will be selling in to build a channel for the launch of Ada and all of the additional Ada products that will be coming to market.

In the original MyDrivers (opens in new tab) article, sources claim that the price reduction is to stimulate such sales and improve the price/performance ratio of the RTX 4080 and has nothing to do with AMD's competing RX 7900 series cards The company points out that.

It is very easy to see the mid-December Radeon GPU launch and Nvidia's price cut as two sides of the same coin, and honestly, they should be. However, they are not necessarily linked because Nvidia needs to lower its prices to compete with the new cards, but rather because it wants to time the RTX 4080 announcement to spoil AMD's announcement.

After all, history and recent rumors suggest that we will be very lucky to get our hands on the RX 7900 XTX early in the New Year. IgorsLab (opens in new tab) even suggests that third-party manufacturers are having driver issues with their cards, and some won't be released until 2023.

AMD cards you can't buy would be unlikely to be involved in making decisions about price cuts beyond the chance of Nvidia pestering the Red Team around its big new release.

No matter what happens with AMD GPUs, Nvidia will have to drop the price on the RTX 4080. To me, it was at least $200 too expensive at launch. The "unannounced" RTX 4080 (opens in new tab) will likely appear in January as the RTX 4070 Ti (opens in new tab), and the price/performance ratio of the RTX 4080 when it actually launches is going to have a big impact on what they can charge for that card. And for all the cards further down the line.

How aggressive Nvidia will be with potential price reductions will be a great indicator of what we can expect from the rest of the Ada lineup in terms of cost, but it's worth pointing out that these are just rumors for now, with nothing concrete to back them up. However, it could be a nice Christmas present from Santa fans.