Yep, RAMnarök ain't going away. The ongoing memory crisis isn't getting better. It's far too busy continuing to fuel hikes in the prices of memory-dependent hardware like graphics cards with AMD reportedly having joined Nvidia on the list of firms raising how much they're charging for GPUs.
According to a report shared by self-described Korean PC tech fan Harukaze5719, who's previously been on the money about the prices of RTX 5060 Ti versions, AMD are pushing up how much they charge their partners for cards by 10%.
Citing anonymous sources in AMD's internal supply chain, the report suggests the company basically waited to pull the trigger on their hikes until competitor Nvidia had set in motion their own graphics card price hike of up to 30%. The latter was reported by Taiwan's Economic Daily News last week. The resulting effect on consumers depends on how much of the hike companies decide to eat themselves, but pending such acts of selfless altruism, two brands of cards which cost a chunk more than they used to looks like the reality we're set for.
But hey, it's not all bad news. Leaks reported by Digital Foundry look to be pointing to AMD Radeon RX 9050 cards with just 4GB of VRAM sliding onto the market. As DF put it: "We've previously marked down graphics cards for shipping with 8GB or even 10GB of memory, as many modern games don't scale gracefully to lower VRAM systems, so seeing even a budget-class card intended for internal resolutions of 1080p or below with this little VRAM is concerning."
AI datacentres sucking up the attention of the world's memory chip makers remains the driving force behind RAMnarök, with Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron currently facing a US lawsuit accusing them of making the crisis worse by fixing RAM prices and supply.