Abstract:
China's graphics card market has seen tight supply again recently. Although the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series has been on the market for nearly two years, many graphics card manufacturers have reportedly struggled to continue to provide sufficient inventory, and some channels have even begun to re-recommend to dealers old products such as the RTX 3060 and RTX 3050 that have been released for several years as alternatives.
According to Chinese supply chain media ChannelGate, some graphics card manufacturers have sold out of their RTX 50 series inventory, while other manufacturers have only limited inventory left and are shipping in batches. As supply tightens, market prices rise simultaneously. Under this circumstance, in order to prevent dealers from running out of goods, manufacturers began to recommend that they purchase older models such as the RTX 3060 12GB version, RTX 3060 8GB version, and RTX 3050. At the same time, some AMD Radeon graphics cards were also included in the replacement list.
Industry insiders believe that the current supply pressure mainly comes from the superposition of multiple factors. First, there is a new rebound in cryptocurrency mining demand, which has once again stimulated the purchase of graphics cards. At the same time, consumer demand brought about by China’s e-commerce promotion season continues to consume inventory. In addition, the RTX 50 series is already facing tight supply problems. NVIDIA has previously been revealed to have reduced the production scale of some game graphics cards due to the huge demand for graphics memory resources in the AI industry, further exacerbating supply pressure.
It is worth noting that the RTX 3060 has actually just been "resurrected" this year. After this graphics card, originally released in 2021, returned to the market, the price has not been reduced due to the aging of the product. Take the U.S. market as an example. In July this year, Newegg re-listed the RTX 3060 at an initial price of $329.99, but this price did not last long. By August, the price of the same MSI product had risen to US$479.99, an increase of about 45% from before.
What’s even more striking is that this price is even higher than some new generation products. The RTX 3060, which was priced at $479.99 at the time, was much more expensive than the newer and more powerful RTX 5050, reflecting the obvious imbalance between supply and demand in the current graphics card market.
ChannelGate predicts that as the supply of the RTX 50 series continues to be tight, the prices of these older graphics cards will not drop due to their long time on the market, but may continue to rise slightly. In the absence of new product supply, dealers may rely more on these old models to maintain sales.
At the same time, the October 2026 Steam hardware survey data released by Valve showed that the RTX 3060 regained the position of the most common graphics card in the world, accounting for 3.62%, slightly higher than the 3.56% of the RTX 5070. RTX 5070 briefly reached the top in September, but its share dropped by 2.3 percentage points in October.
Another notable change in the investigation comes from system memory configuration. 16GB memory once again became the most common configuration among Steam users, accounting for 41.42%, while 32GB memory, which once ranked first, fell back to 37.06%.
However, analysts pointed out that this does not mean that a large number of players are giving up on RTX 5070. Hardware media Hardware Busters believes that the statistical results are largely affected by changes in the structure of the Steam survey sample. Data shows that the proportion of Steam users using the simplified Chinese interface dropped from about 31% in September to less than 22% in October. Since Valve does not conduct weighted statistics by region, after the decline in the proportion of Chinese user participation, the proportion of the new generation of mid-range graphics cards that are more popular in the Chinese market will naturally fall, thus affecting the overall ranking results.
Under the joint influence of the AI industry, high-performance computing demand and consumer market activities, the supply shortage problem in the graphics card market has not been completely alleviated. For Chinese channel dealers, the RTX 3060 and RTX 3050, which have gradually withdrawn from the mainstream market, are now unexpectedly ushering in a second sales peak.
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