Pakistan’s Bizarre New Graphics Card Tax System is Based on VRAM Quantity

Starting things off, and putting graphics cards to one side for a moment, most countries tend to have a fairly standard tax rate/system when it comes to retail products. Now, admittedly, this is not always entirely straightforward and particularly so in countries like America where the tax rate can vary quite significantly depending on which state you’re currently in. By and large though, with a number of products occasionally being classed as exempt due to being deemed human necessities, the retail tax rate generally (no, not always) has a blanket effect with no one particular item largely being more penalised than another.

Following a report via Videocardz, however, Pakistan is looking set to introduce a new tax specifically targeting graphics cards. And even more bizarrely, it appears that the tax rate is going to be based upon how much VRAM the GPU is supplied with!

Pakistan to Introduce New Graphics Card Tax Based on VRAM?!

According to the report, and the leak of what appears to be an official state document, Pakistan is set to introduce a new tax system specifically for graphics cards. In it, rather than it being based upon something mildly sensible like their MSRP, it instead seems that the tax rate will be based upon how much VRAM (memory) the GPU is provided with.

So, with this new system in mind, something like the Nvidia 3090, featuring 24GB of VRAM, will be subject to the top rate of (after conversion) $540 in additional tax charges on top of however much that GPU is sold for in the country.

While it’s currently unclear as to whether this will apply to laptops, it does largely seem to be focusing on dedicated desktop models. With this in mind though, it clearly opens up crazy situations where consumers will pay less tax on the higher-tier Nvidia 3060 Ti than the standard 3060 due to the latter coming with 4GB more memory!

What Are We Missing?

While VRAM has typically represented a pretty solid representation of performance tiers, it’s clearly an incredibly imperfect methodology to base a tax system upon. And for AMD whose GPUs typically come with more comparative VRAM than Nvidia? Well, it certainly sucks to be them! – Then again, it does cut both ways as even AMD doesn’t have any models approaching the amount of memory that comes with the Nvidia 3090 or 3090 Ti.

Overall, the system seems insane. There may, however, be something of a point to it. – And specifically in regards to the fact that the tax may primarily be looking to focus on import duty.

Typically speaking, VRAM can play a pretty major role in cryptocurrency production (and particularly so in regards to Ethereum). With Pakistan having experienced a pretty huge problem recently with illegal mining operations, therefore, it’s entirely possible that this is the primary factor which has led them to specifically pursue VRAM as the key factor in this new graphics card tax. – In other words, in one (exceptionally poorly informed) light, it does kind of make sense.

For general consumers though? Well, this is really going to stink!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!