Facepalm: In what sounds like a depressing if unsurprising move, Nvidia has reportedly canceled the OPP, a program designed to incentivize AIB partners to sell its graphics cards at MSRP. If true, this means that the already high prices of GPUs are going to increase even further.
Claims that Nvidia has ended OPP come from Roman 'Der8auer' Hartung and HardwareLuxx. In a video on his YouTube channel, Der8auer describes the initiative as "basically like a cashback thing where Nvidia tried to actively influence the AIBs and the pricing to make sure that some cards happen on the market and that they are actually being sold by the AIBs for the MSRP."
Der8auer warns that the end of OPP means that the MSRPs Nvidia has previously announced no longer exist – though one could argue that's been the case for a while. He said to "expect massive price increases across all of these cards."
Nvidia has not publicly revealed what OPP stands for, though HardwareLuxx believes it to be Open Price Program.
While Nvidia has not officially confirmed the program's cancellation, multiple outlets report that partners were informed privately that OPP support had ended.
According to HardwareLuxx, the program was never intended to cover the full production run of a given graphics card, but instead applied to a limited number of units per model. Even so, it allegedly played a role in keeping at least some cards anchored near MSRP, giving Nvidia plausible deniability when market prices inevitably drifted higher.
The memory crisis has already pushed up the price of several PC components (and other electronics). The last thing gamers want is something else making them even pricier.
Der8auer also commented on the RTX 5070 Ti. It was reported last week that the RTX 5070 Ti is effectively dead after Asus told Hardware Unboxed that the model is currently facing a supply shortage and, as a result, has been placed into end of life status. Asus tried to walk back some of what it said, but it didn't change the fact that the RTX 5070 Ti is heavily supply constrained to the point of being effectively killed.
Also read: Nvidia is reportedly cutting RTX 50-series production to focus on AI demand
Der8auer said that while the 5070 Ti had not reached EOL, Nvidia was instead prioritizing production of the RTX 5080 – both cards use the GB203 die and feature 16 GB of GDDR7 VRAM, but the 5080 is much pricier and more lucrative for Nvidia. Der8auer thinks the 5080 will become even more of an earner for Team Green due to what his sources say will be a 40 to 50% price increase that's coming soon.
The end of OPP and the growing supply and pricing pressures across Nvidia's lineup paint a bleak picture for gamers hoping for relief anytime soon. With incentives to keep cards near MSRP seemingly gone, production reportedly skewing toward higher-margin models, and broader component costs continuing to rise, Nvidia appears increasingly comfortable letting market forces and partner pricing do the heavy lifting.
Whether this is a short-term response to supply constraints or a longer-term shift in strategy, the result is likely the same for consumers: fewer realistically priced GPUs, more eye-watering launch MSRPs that quickly become meaningless, and a widening gap between what Nvidia advertises and what buyers actually pay at retail.
