If there’s one single event that has impacted PC gamers in the past year and a half, it’s the semiconductor shortage. What might have otherwise been a far-off issue for most was brought home to our gaming PCs by a complete lack of the latest graphics cards available to purchase at a reasonable price. But, as the stock appears to improve in 2022, and prices start to drop, one is left wondering whether it’s getting better already.
“I do think that things are better,” said Dr. Thomas Goldsby, the Haslam Chair of Logistics at the University of Tennessee’s Master of Science in Supply Chain Management online program. “You may recall that we broke the problem down in terms of supply and demand. And most people focus on the supply part, but you cannot overlook the demand implications a pandemic when people were altering lifestyles, altering work, play, and entertainment… By virtue of Omicron presenting this ugly head and fortunately starting to relent. It helps us on both sides. It helps us in terms of people getting back and starting to live a little bit more in a sense of normal life. And then also our ability of our supply chains to perform at a kind of pre-Covid level. And so there is some normalizing, which I think would help to explain why maybe supplies a bit improved, maybe prices are starting to relent a bit.”
That insight might help to explain why graphics card stock levels have appeared to increase in recent weeks. However, prices have yet to drop to their MSRPs despite this new influx of cards.
Can we avoid a semiconductor shortage in the future? Only time will tell, but our brush with a flaky supply over the past few years has shown how reliant we are on these clever blocks of sand. Graphics cards are just one part of a wider industry shaken by global events, and all will no doubt be taking note of how to avoid the worst of it in the future.
(All information was provided by PCGamer)
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