With graphics card prices as high as they are, NVIDIA could charge upwards of $1500 for its next-gen GeForce GTX 2080.

I've been getting ahead of NVIDIA's next-gen graphics card reveal with some exclusive stories and pondering, but with sources revealing to me exclusively that NVIDIA would launch the GeForce GTX 20 series at GTC in May, these thoughts are ramping up.

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NVIDIA's current flagship GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is still over $1200 on Amazon, and with news that graphics card prices will not get better this year (right through to Q3 2018), what could NVIDIA price their next-gen GTX 20 series at? $1499. Yeah, freaking $1499.

Think about it.

The current inflated prices of graphics cards has seen the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti fly past $1200, meaning that a successor to NVIDIA's flagship GTX 10 series card could be more expensive than the usual launch prices. NVIDIA debuted the GeForce GTX 1080 for $699, but they had a starting price of just $599 and launched in May 2016.

Fast forward to today and the GeForce GTX 1080 is listed on Amazon for between $800-$1000.

Now imagine that the GeForce GTX 2080 has the performance of GTX 1080s in SLI (which is usually what happens, the GTX 1080 was about as good as two GTX 980s in SLI), and we're talking about $1600-$2000 of 'value' in SLI-based performance. As usual, let's take away the not-so-great multi-GPU scaling in most games and we're going to get around 30-50% more performance with a second GTX 1080.

With this in mind the GeForce GTX 2080 should land at somewhere between 30-50% more performance than what GTX 1080 SLI is capable of, but with lower power consumption and improved performance at higher resolutions. We should expect the GTX 2080 to feature GDDR6 memory technology, which is much faster than GDDR5X which was already much faster than GDDR5.

The GeForce GTX 2070 would launch with a slower set of GDDR6 memory, or even be knocked down to slower GDDR5X (11Gbps, or faster depending on what NVIDIA has been working on) or the faster GDDR5 (above the 10Gbps offered) tech. GDDR6 will be driving speeds somewhere between 14Gbps and 16Gbps, which is where the difference could be between the GTX 2070 and GTX 2080.

As it stands, I can't see how NVIDIA can launch the GTX 2080 at its 'usual' launch price of $599-$699, when cards that are SLOWER than it (GTX 1080) are nearly DOUBLE the price. Why would anyone buy the GTX 1080 at $1000, even miners... when the GTX 2080 is $599-$699?

We need something to power those new Big Format Gaming Displays (BFGDs) that will see us gaming on huge 65-inch 4K 120Hz HDR G-Sync TVs, right?!