Why does GPU pricing have to be so infuriating?

I NOTED A WHILE BACK that prices of pretty much everything had normalized with the pandemic receding and other supply chain abnormalities subsiding. The one exception were GPUs. Several months later, while graphics cards are cheaper, they still haven't returned to historical trends. But what's even more frustrating is that pricing just doesn't make sense.

- Jeremy Laird

The most recent example of this involves AMD’s hot new Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT boards, but we’ll come back to those GPUs in a moment. The overarching problem here, aside from the more obvious issue of painfully high pricing, involves comparative value for money.

Call it bang for buck or frames per dollar, whatever you prefer, the value curve when it comes to all manner of electronics has always been the same. You get more for your money at the lower end of the market.

For a product like a GPU, that means the absolute best-of-the-best graphics card might be five times the cost of an entry-level board, but only offer two or three times the performance. Somehow, however, that value scaling up as you move down through the range has been lost of late.