AMD is reportedly bumping the price of its GPU and VRAM bundles to graphics card makers and you can expect to feel the sting soon

AMD’s latest line of GPUs barely followed MSRP at launch, and yet they may be set to get even pricier in the future.

As reported by Sweclockers, a poster took to Board Channels, a forum for communicating between manufacturers and partners, to share news of an AMD price increase. Effectively, it claims that Sapphire, Asus, and XFX have all been told that the supply price of GPU and video memory bundles from AMD will be bumped up by around 10% in July.

The post in question has been machine translated by Sweclockers, as the board primarily operates in Chinese, and it’s otherwise difficult to get access to. It tends to be well vetted, so claims made on the forum tend to have some validity, though AMD haven’t confirmed anything as of yet.

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Historically AMD and Nvidia have provided graphics card manufacturers with the video memory in a bundle with the GPU. That made sense for the GPU manufacturer as it could take advantage of the economies of scale to buy that VRAM in bulk. However, the memory crisis has proven to be a thorn in the side of consumer PC hardware, and for every manufacturer, so those bundles are going up and it seems likely the end user will be the one paying at least some of the extra.

Though it’s not absolutely guaranteed the reported 10% price increase will be passed on to the consumer, partners buying GPU bundles for manufacture won’t want to take the price hit on their own, so they will likely adjust their own pricing to make up the difference.

As the price increase is expected to come into effect in July, partners should honour supply deals made prior to the change. So, any cards already in retailers, and those already in the manufacturing pipeline theoretically shouldn’t be affected. That 10% increase won’t be immediately visible, though it will likely hit us all eventually.

AMD Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards on a grey background

(Image credit: Future)

Late last year, it was rumoured Nvidia would stop bundling VRAM into its GPUs, leaving it up to partners to buy the GPU die alone and purchase the rest of the supporting cast themselves. It was theorised that would allow larger manufacturers, with wider relations to GDDR6/7 suppliers, to pick and choose where to buy their VRAM from, but the flip side is that smaller GPU vendors without those connections might struggle to compete.

So, while the price increase is a bummer, at least AMD is in some way helping support its smaller partners. Small crumbs, I know.

Unfortunately, with the memory crisis likely to go on for some time still, AMD probably isn’t going to be bringing those prices back down any time soon. That means things are likely to get worse for hardware manufacturers and enthusiasts before they get any better.