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GPU Prices Are Rising Again: Should UK Buyers Wait?
Nvidia and AMD have hiked GPU prices again in 2026 as a DRAM shortage bites. Here's what UK buyers should do before their next graphics card purchase.
Nvidia and AMD have hiked GPU prices again in 2026 as a DRAM shortage bites. Here's what UK buyers should do before their next graphics card purchase.
Graphics card prices are moving again, and this time it isn't just the flagships. Nvidia has confirmed a third GeForce RTX price increase since January 2026, with some cards rising by as much as 30%, and AMD has followed with a 10% hike on Radeon GPU kit pricing. If you're a UK buyer who's been waiting for the market to settle before picking up a new card, this is the news you needed and didn't want.
The cause isn't the usual mix of tariffs, scalpers or AI-datacentre demand you've heard blamed before, at least not directly. This time it's memory. Samsung raised DRAM prices by roughly 20%, and that increase is rippling straight through into the GDDR6 and GDDR7 chips that sit on every graphics card's PCB. When memory gets more expensive, so does the finished GPU, whether it's a £250 budget card or a £2,000 flagship.
This is the third distinct move of the year. January brought a 10 to 15% increase across the board. May saw a narrower rise that mostly hit the RTX 5090. This latest one is different because it isn't confined to the top of the stack: reports out of Taiwan's supply chain point to increases across the entire GeForce RTX lineup, and retailers are already adjusting. In the US, an Asus RTX 5080 listed on Amazon jumped from $1,199 to $1,595 in a matter of weeks, a shift big enough that some Chinese retail platforms reportedly pulled Nvidia cards from listings entirely rather than reprice them mid-stock.
None of that is a UK retail figure and we won't pretend otherwise, this is a US example included to show the scale of the move, not the number you'll see on a UK shelf. For the actual current UK picture, our GPU price tracker is the place to check rather than any single article, since prices are moving week to week right now. We covered the underlying UK trend through July in our GPU prices UK 2026 breakdown; this hike sits on top of, and updates, that picture.
It's worth being clear that this isn't really a graphics card story, it's a memory story that happens to be landing hardest on graphics cards right now. We've tracked the same DRAM pressure pushing UK RAM pricing up over the same period, and a separate price-fixing lawsuit against Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron is already underway in the US covering exactly this kind of memory pricing behaviour. Market analysts are describing the underlying DRAM crunch as likely to run through 2028, not weeks. If that holds, GPU pricing pressure from memory costs isn't a one-off spike to ride out, it's a multi-year backdrop buyers need to plan around.
That matters for how you read this hike. A shortage caused by a factory fire or a shipping delay tends to resolve. A shortage caused by structural underinvestment in DRAM fab capacity, which is closer to what's being described here, tends to grind on and get passed to buyers repeatedly rather than in one clean jump.
It's tempting to treat this as an Nvidia problem you can dodge by switching camps, but AMD's Radeon GPU kit prices went up around 10% in July too. Both major GPU vendors buy the same GDDR memory from the same handful of suppliers, so neither has much room to absorb the cost increase without passing it on. If you were weighing a Radeon card specifically to avoid Nvidia's pricing, factor in that AMD isn't immune to the same memory market, even if its increase has been smaller so far.
There's no single right answer here, it depends on what you're buying and why.
If your current card has actually failed, or you've got a build sat half-finished waiting on a graphics card, don't gamble on prices coming down before you need the machine working. Buy against your budget now, check our GPU category page for the best currently available price on the tier you want, and don't stretch up a tier chasing a "deal" that might not materialise.
If you're upgrading rather than replacing a dead card, there's a case for patience, but not blind patience. Set a price alert on the specific model you want rather than watching the market in general, since broad "GPU prices" headlines (including this one) tell you the direction of travel, not the number that matters for your build. If the card you want moves 15-20% in the next quarter, that's your answer either way.
Budget and mid-range cards have historically had thinner margins than flagships, which can mean the same percentage hike does more damage in absolute terms to a £280 card than a £2,000 one, even though it sounds smaller. If you're shopping under roughly £350, this hike is worth taking seriously rather than assuming it's a flagship-only story.
A few options reduce your exposure to this specific price cycle without requiring you to gamble on timing:
It's also worth knowing you're not alone in feeling squeezed out of upgrading. Recent industry coverage found that a majority of PC gamers now have no plans to build a new PC in the next two years, citing pricing pressure on RAM and other components as the reason. If that's where you've landed too, buying a previous-generation card or holding your current build another cycle is a defensible choice, not a compromise.
This hike is real, it's confirmed across both major GPU vendors, and it's driven by a memory shortage that shows no sign of resolving quickly. That doesn't mean panic-buying is the right response, but it does mean treating "prices will surely come down" as wishful thinking rather than a plan. Check current UK pricing on the GPU category page against your actual budget and need, not against what the market was doing back in the spring, and use the hedges above if you can flex on timing or tier.
Source: NVIDIA Raises Graphics Card Prices for the Third Time in 2026 as Retailers Fear More Increases
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This article was written with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor. Price data is sourced from Amazon UK. For more information, see our About page.