More than a year after the release of Nvidia's RTX 30 series GPUs, these graphics cards are still next to impossible to find at anywhere near MSRP AMD's cards are not faring much better, despite earlier assurances to avoid a paper launch ...

The combination of pandemic-hit supply chain issues and the card being a moneymaker for cryptocurrency miners makes it nearly impossible for the average gamer to see it.

For those who don't want to spend twice the MSRP on an eBay card, good news may be forthcoming: Videocardz has leaked on the Chinese forum Bilibili that a cheap AMD GPU will be available in early 2022 from a user with a "good" track record. The post was found.

According to the leak, the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT will arrive in January and the Radeon RX 6400 in March. Both cards will feature 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and the less expensive RX 6400 does not appear to need to be connected to a PSU as it consumes less than 75W of power. Earlier rumors indicated that the RX 6500 XT would have a 1,024-core Navi 24 GPU and the RX 6400 would have a 768-core Navi 24 GPU.

While it is tempting to be cynical that such inexpensive cards will not be cheap for long once supply issues arise, these have a little more reason to be optimistic: limited VRAM means that these GPUs are not very useful for cryptocurrency miners, and the RX 6500 XT will have a 1,024-core Navi 24 GPU, which is a bit more expensive than the RX 6400 XT, The less ambitious specs mean that, hopefully, they will be a little easier to manufacture on a large scale.

Of course, none of this is very encouraging if the cards are not optimized for the latest games, something we won't know until benchmarks start coming out. However, on spec, 1080p is generally the upper limit for games.

Of course, AMD is not the only company reportedly planning a new GPU for early 2022. Just yesterday, Nvidia was reportedly planning a desktop version of its GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, a relatively low-end card that is itself supposedly built to target Intel's upcoming debut GPU, the Arc GPU.

For those prepared to pay top dollar, an exciting move is slated to come at the end of the year, when Nvidia is apparently planning to launch its RTX 40 series, but if crypto mining continues to look attractive, it may prove to be as scarce as its predecessors.