We all hoped the GPU shortage would be over before the end of the year, but at the start of 2022, the situation hasn’t improved.
From the entrance of a third major competitor to the cautiously optimistic signs for increased supply, 2022 is shaping up to be an inflection point.
Intel announced that Arc Alchemist is in over 50 desktops and laptops “coming soon” at CES, but the company didn’t provide details on what cards are in the range, when they’ll arrive, or how much they’ll cost.
It functions similarly to Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling , and Intel has announced that Hitman 3, The Riftbreaker, and Death Stranding: Director’s Cut will support the feature at launch.
It’s been too long that the GPU market has been wrapped up in the AMD and Nvidia rivalry, so I’m looking forward to what Intel can do with Arc Alchemist.
Nvidia recently launched a 12GB variant of the RTX 2060 Super, and at CES, Nvidia and AMD came with new desktop announcements.
These cards are a counter to Nvidia’s Max-Q offerings, focusing on performance per watt instead of raw performance.
The RTX 3080 Ti mobile and RTX 3070 Ti will eventually replace the non-Ti models in laptops, and they should offer a sizeable increase in performance.
I don’t suspect we’ll see any more mobile GPUs from Nvidia or AMD, at least not from the current generations.
But the GPU market isn’t normal right now, and I can’t tell you where GPU prices will go.
The cost of components is up in the air, and graphics cards are still subject to a 25% tariff.
I suspect we’ll see a drop in prices at the beginning of the year, a boost around summer, and another dip in the fall .
The coronavirus pandemic massively increased the demand for PCs and graphics cards, and that demand hasn’t gone away — even as plenty of people return to the office.
Intel’s CEO said something similar, stating that the chip shortage will improve throughout 2022, hopefully creating a stable supply chain by 2023.
Looking into next year, I expect you’ll be able to find graphics cards more easily at online retailers, but their prices will remain high.
They’re mostly bottom-of-the-barrel options — the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which is a great graphics card, is likely in stock due to its price — but there are cards available.
A launch in fall 2022 would keep with Nvidia’s usual release cadence, and multiple leakers have pointed to a release around that time.
Rumors suggest that Nvidia is ditching Samsung as its manufacturer of choice for these cards, instead developing them on chipmaker TSMC’s N5 process.
Originally, rumors claimed that AMD would launch these cards at the end of 2021, but it seems the launch date has slipped into 2022.
These cards will also reportedly use the N5 node, which could offer up to a 2.5x increase in performance over AMD’s current offerings.
Going into 2022, I expect the conversation around upscaling and image quality to heat up.
AMD would need to wait until it releases RX 7000 GPUs because the current cards don’t have the necessary hardware.
Nvidia quietly released DLSS 2.3 not too long ago, and it seems like these iterative updates will be par for the course over the next year.
Intel plans on releasing two versions of XeSS, one that works specifically with Intel graphics cards and another that works across all GPUs.
I’m anticipating that Intel, Nvidia, and AMD will go back and forth on image quality and performance for their upscaling features, whichever is most beneficial to them at the time.