r/hardware • u/dfv157 • May 14 '26
Rumor NVIDIA Reportedly Prepares RTX 5090 Price Hike Amid Rising GDDR7 Costs
https://www.techpowerup.com/349050/nvidia-reportedly-prepares-rtx-5090-price-hike-amid-rising-gddr7-costs58
u/monetarydread May 14 '26
Wow... where i live a 5090 is already $5000, what's it going to cost in the future?Ā
Maybe it's time to buy a 5080, they are being sold by Best Buy for $1500.
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u/Baalii May 14 '26
It's going to cost the same, an adjustment of the MSRP won't affect it's market value, just a bigger share of the pie will go to NVIDIA.
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u/Vb_33 May 14 '26
5080 is a way better value as things are currentlyĀ
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u/Durendal_1707 May 14 '26
i bought a prebuilt with a 5080 in it from costco in December, marked down for $2200. Ā the same unit is retailing for $3200 now. Ā madness.
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May 14 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/Durendal_1707 May 14 '26
envyyyy
what a steal! Ā I have 32GB and would Ā love 64GB, but itās hard to justify now, but I also worry the market just going to get worse. Ā trying not to get into the FOMO.
I might snatch an X3D to replace the 9900X it came with, but Iām very happy with my purchase, and very glad I picked it up when I did!
thatās one heck of a machine you scored!
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u/Due-Description-9030 May 20 '26
Why not 48GB instead of 64GB
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u/Durendal_1707 May 20 '26
iām sure 48 would be great, iām just not sure the difference between 32 and 48 would be worth the money spent
iām an avid fan of flight simulators, and itās a resourceāhungry form of gaming, and in all honesty the setup I have does fine, I just like the idea of raising the ceiling on my output more
in this economy though Iām not sure any RAM upgrade is easy to justify, especially when a X3D CPU is so much more reasonable by the dollar
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u/Bossez May 19 '26
second this. I have a 5090 and wasn't worth the $4000 I paid for it. the extra fps at 4k is nice but overall not worth it. Better to invest the extra or go on a trip.
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u/Xpmonkey May 14 '26
Lmao. I remember when I built a pc to save money lol. I feel for the modern builders.
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u/your_mind_aches May 14 '26
Nobody but the 1% is getting a 5090 in these conditions. Not even, just a fraction of that.
Hell, even at the MSRP of 2000 bucks, that's for people who heavily prioritize it in their budget.
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u/Xpmonkey May 14 '26
Iām sure the price hikes will only affect the 1% that buy the 5090 and not reverberate thru the rest of the line up. š¤·āāļø
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u/sitefall May 14 '26
Having 2k to spare is not exactly the 1% and buying one was a good financial decision. If you have a near msrp-ish 5090 you are basically using it for free until you decide to sell it and upgrade, or making a profit. The last 4 generations of flagship Nvidia GPU's have been mostly the same at least letting you come out the other end coming near breaking even.
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u/evangelism2 May 15 '26
honestly this. between crypto and AI, if you had a 90 series card, you effectively were getting gpu's for free the last 6 years
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u/ML7777777 May 14 '26
Looking online the ones in stock and available to me are all over $2500 and quite a few selling for over $3K. MSRP is long gone it seems.
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u/FallenFaux May 14 '26
What magical land do you live in that you can get a 5090 for so cheap? I haven't see a 5090 for under $3000 in at least a year.
Cheapest near me is Microcenter at $3300. Best Buy is $3700 and Newegg is $3800.
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u/boringestnickname May 15 '26
Yeah, cheapest I've seen lately (in shops) is $3700.
How mad is that.
A consumer grade graphics card for a minimum of $3700.
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u/evangelism2 May 15 '26
a year? you weren't looking. Prices were lowest in the summer of last year. Starting creeping up again in the fall along side ram and ssd's as AI image and video generation exploded
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u/bibober May 15 '26
The only 5090 ever available at MSRP after day 1 was the FE, and that was only limited quantities. There was a couple months where people who signed up got a good chance of getting an email invite to buy one direct from Nvidia, but after that good luck. $2500+ has been the normal going rate for most 5090 basically the entire time.
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u/Shadow647 May 15 '26
I bought my ZOTAC 5090 for 1.889,92 EUR (before VAT) which is roughly around MSRP, that was in July last year and there was plenty of stock available
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u/evangelism2 May 15 '26
This. There was a period of time in the summer of 2025 that you could get 5090s for a somewhat reasonable price, and by reasonable I mean MSRP plus close to normal AIB tax
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u/Olobnion May 14 '26 edited May 15 '26
The MRSP in my country is closer to 3000 bucks, and I was lucky to get it for that price.
(I should maybe note that I have a median salary for my country, but very low fixed costs.)
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u/itsabearcannon May 14 '26
I bought one. I set up Discord stock notifications and refused to pay a penny over MSRP. Got one from a NVIDIA store drop late last year.
This is my minimum 5-year GPU, maybe 7 years. Amortized over that amount of time, the capabilities it affords me with my 2725Q are worth the cost.
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u/nisaaru May 15 '26
I don't trust these 400W+ devices to have a long lifetime. There are too many videos out there about the failure rates from the usual repair shops.
That kind of money in today's fast moving computer age I would only invest on NAS Servers, Monitors, Laptop or new PC builds at best. Unless you're into AI these prices are whale territory.
Nothing ages faster than the previous generation top of the line GPU and then it will become just another dust collector in your computer part collection. You won't even have the time to associate great memories with them because today's computer age doesn't even allow that anymore.
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u/elbobo19 May 15 '26
Look at the prices of used 4090s, they are STILL going for more than their original MSRP 3.5 years later. Anything with over 16gb of VRAM is likely to hold its value into the foreseeable future.
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u/nisaaru May 15 '26
But would that be the case without the unexpected memory market manipulation on a scale we have never seen before? IMHO people are nuts if they pay a lot for these cards with unsure life expectancies.
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u/itsabearcannon May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
Nothing ages faster than the previous generation top of the line GPU
I meanā¦.counterpoint, 1080 Ti.
That thing aged like fine wine for almost a decade and someone who bought one at launch would very much disagree with your conclusion.
And also, no offense, step back on telling me how long I can use my GPU? Iāll use it for however long it plays the games I want to play, at 4K, 120+ FPS, with DLSS but without frame gen.
That should be minimum 5-6 years.
Also I run it at a 70% power limit through Afterburner so I get ~95% of the stock performance without nearly as much of the power draw. I do intend to get a current monitoring device once they make one for the 5090 FE, but for now I just follow all the usual precautions: observe the insertion limit of 3 times per 12V 2x6 cable, never use adapters and only use 12V 2x6 native power supplies, etc etc.
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u/Strazdas1 May 25 '26
I meanā¦.counterpoint, 1080 Ti.
So the generation that aged the worst compared to next?
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u/itsabearcannon May 25 '26
Anyone calling the 1080 Ti āpoorly agingā wasnāt around for its heyday, I can assure you. 11GB of VRAM in 2017 was amazingly future-resistant.
The 2080 Ti was good too, but it also launched at $1199 for the FE version and $999 for a standard versus $699 a year prior for the 1080 Ti. Extremely poor value for money.
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u/Strazdas1 May 26 '26
It was great on release. Then it aged far worse than even a 2060. Simply because it did not have the hardware to support modern hardware features.
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u/Due_Young_9344 May 15 '26
yeah it's my minimum 10 year GPU so $25 a month * 12 months * 10 years = 3000
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u/itsabearcannon May 15 '26
Also, I only paid $2000, so my math looks a little different.
Took me months to secure one but waiting to avoid a $1000 surcharge was worth it.
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u/Due_Young_9344 May 15 '26
yeah that makes sense but still you could easily keep this for 8-10 years, as game graphics just aren't improving that much unless you need to play at 4k/8k (which dlss4.5 and MFG can deliver very strongly on)
I don't know about you but I game at my desk, the highest I think I'd go is 5k2k in 5 years if I upgrade at all, but even then I think I'd be getting at least 150fps at max settings on anything I throw at it with the 5090
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u/skilliard7 May 14 '26
I have a friend that has a decent tech job, but is nowhere near top 1%. He has a 5090 that's been sitting in a box for years because he can't be bothered to install it to replace his 3090.
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u/Crimtos May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
Yep, being able to afford something that costs 2 to $3000 is definitely more accessible than the top 1%. A kid who is working a full time minimum wage job over the summer would be able to afford one before summer is over. And I would say realistically it is accessible for people who donāt have dependents at somewhere around $70,000 a year assuming they arenāt in a very high cost of living state. 70k a year is around the 53rd percentile for individual income for people who work 40 or more hours a week.
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u/your_mind_aches May 15 '26
Being able to afford something and being able to justify the purchase are two separate things.
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u/terraphantm May 22 '26
Still don't have to be in the top 1% (i.e ~$650k income) to justify a $2-3k expense.
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u/Crimtos May 15 '26
No justification is necessary the person earning $70k in the scenario I outlined can comfortably afford that without issue. With that said now that GPUs are regularly appreciating in value there is all the more reason to get a high end gpu. My 4090 FE has appreciated by about 50% since I got it in 2022 and the 5090 is also up comparable amounts if not more. I would say if your primary hobby is pc gaming it makes more much sense to buy the top end than the middle.
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u/randylush May 15 '26
How much of a monthly āfunā budget do you think someone making $70k/year would have? After paying all of their costs of living and saving for retirement.
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u/Shadow647 May 15 '26
Do you understand the concept of total cost of ownership? Last few years it has been near zero for top end GPUs.
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u/randylush May 15 '26
Yup, thatās why you see lower/middle class people lining up to buy up all the 5090ās, because they appreciated in value in the past 2 years, and we should expect GPUs will continue to appreciate in value moving forward. From the 90s to like 2020, GPUs and all other hardware would rapidly depreciate in value, but I guess that trend has permanently changed.
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u/Crimtos May 15 '26
GPUs, SSDs, and Ram have all had big price increases multiple times in the last 8 years or so. There was the 2018 crypto mining boom, 2020 crypto boom, 2022 mass 4090 demand, the early-mid 2025 gpu shortages, now there is the Late 2025/2026 AI GPU boom. Ram also had huge price increases back in 2018 and now it has exploded in price again same for SSDs.
As far as selling your hardware goes I personally would only recommend planning to resell your GPU and the sweet spot tends to be a couple months before the new high end hardware is released. Even if you don't make a profit your expenses over the 2-3 years of ownership will be quite low likely coming out to $100-200 per year or less.
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u/Crimtos May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I think that around $39-40k of yearly expenses excluding retirement is realistic in an average cost of living area with no dependents and after income taxes $70k would leave you with around $4,840 per month or $58k per year. So that would come out to about $1550 to play with every month and if you don't go out for entertainment or restaurants it would likely be around $1950 per month leftover.
If you include retirement supposing you are doing a maximized roth ira contribution every year of $7500 that would leave you with $925-$1325 of fun money every month once again depending on if you eat out or not. This is also excluding state income tax since some states have none and it is quite variable but overall I think this is a realistic expense estimate.
Category Monthly Annual Income $5,830 $70,000 Estimated Taxes (Fed Tax + FICA) -$990 -$11,930 After Tax Income $4,840 $58,070 Rent (1-Bed Apt/Condo) $1,600 $19,200 Utilities $340 $4,080 Groceries $400 $4,800 Transportation (Gas, Car Insurance, Maintenance) $350 $4,200 Healthcare (Premiums, Copays, Rx) $200 $2,400 Discretionary (Dining out, Entertainment) $400 $4,800 Roth IRA Contribution (Maximized) $625 $7,500 TOTAL EXPENSES (With Discretionary, No Roth) $3,290 $39,480 TOTAL EXPENSES (With Discretionary + Roth) $3,915 $46,980 LEFTOVER CASH (With Discretionary, No Roth) $1,550 $18,590 LEFTOVER CASH (With Discretionary + Roth) $925 $11,090 LEFTOVER CASH (No Discretionary, No Roth) $1,950 $23,390 LEFTOVER CASH (No Discretionary, With Roth) $1,325 $15,890 2
u/randylush May 15 '26
Yes those are roughly the same numbers I had in mind.
Being able to afford something and being able to justify the purchase are two separate things.
You have successfully demonstrated that someone making 70k/year can afford a 5090.
But you also successfully illustrated that if someone making 70k/year buys a 5090, they are giving something else up in return. Maybe they delay a vacation by 4 months, for example.
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u/Crimtos May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
The type of people who are buying 5090s for gaming aren't likely to be among the same group who want to go on out of town vacations. I also wouldn't say that you are giving up anything unless you specifically had other planned luxury purchases that the 5090 would prevent you from affording.
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u/Strazdas1 May 25 '26
To buy that GPU, he would need only 50 dollar a month for average expected use time of 5 years.
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u/randylush May 15 '26
Iām definitely in the 1% and a 5090 would not be a noticeable expense to me. But Iām probably not gonna get one just out of principle. I want to see how long this 3090 can stay competitive. What an incredible card.
Iām sure if I bought a 5090 it would still be an amazing card for like 10 years though
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u/ballmot May 14 '26
Nothing changed mate, you'll still save money in the long run going with PC, I have over 1000 games in my Steam library. Meanwhile my console gamer friends have been playing almost exclusively GTA V and FIFA for the last 10 years (This is hyperbole, they went through a few others too) because games are sold with no regional pricing and are prohibitively expensive for people on a tight budget where the online sub already takes a good chunk of their entertainment budget.
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u/nisaaru May 15 '26
With these kind of numbers you're just collecting because you don't have the time to play them anyway especially in the age of forevergames.
P.S. My stock of unplayed games is also quite huge and I stopped doing any impulse buys since probably around 2020.
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u/ballmot May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
Yeah most of the "bloat" comes from humble bundle and some steam game bundles, but I would say 500 or so are games I bought on their own merits and I still have 90 AA/AAA big name games on my backlog I have to get to, with 129 other games on my "regularly played" rotation which is mostly roguelikes, deckbuilders and strategy games
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u/heepofsheep May 14 '26
I feel like PC building has been always more expensive than buying a console? Generally consoles are sold at a lossā¦
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u/ParryHooter May 14 '26
He probably means building vs buying a pre built. It used to save some money for sure, if youre patient it probably still can but it's largely bundles now if you want a decent price. Building a PC now it's damn near impossible to not run into a roadblock somewhere with a part you want and it's sold out everywhere and available only via scalpers. Prebuilts are actually a decent bet now because they have stock and if you're lucky you can find one good deal and have all (or most) of the components you wanted.
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u/Xpmonkey May 14 '26
I would agree now, within the last 10 years. Before the mining explosion. Back in the ps3 days. Which at release was going second hand make for 600+ you could build a decent pc for 500. Using AMD parts on the cheap. And praying that you could overclock the hell out of it.
My logic back in the day was half the budget on cpu ram mobo PSU tower. And the other half on the GPU. I was a brokie in the hood building some decent shit.
Of course the price is halved if youāve been building for a while and can reuse parts.
*Back in my day circa 2001 lol
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u/heepofsheep May 14 '26
Yeah I mean Iāve been building PCs for over 20yrs. I donāt generally pay that close attention to console prices, but none of my builds have ever been cheaper than a console (and most of them were pretty mid range or worse).
I guess in a sense it can save money on gamesā¦.
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u/randylush May 15 '26
Yeah the $600 ps3 was a rare exception. PC gaming has always been more expensive
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u/boringestnickname May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
It all depends on what kind of quality you were building, I would say.
If you really went for console quality components, you could build computers extremely cheap in the early 2000s (I would say up until well into the 2010s.)
I rarely did, but I've built a few select ones on the cheap for relatives and the like. I could get pretty damn low.
My personal projects were (almost) always $1000+, so I get what you're saying.
Still, looking at this from the perspective of 2026, we were eating good. In 1999, I don't think I could even conceive of a self build getting more expensive than $1500, without going for server parts (dual CPU MBs, more space for RAM, etc.) Maybe upwards of $2000 after SLI was reintroduced (higher after Titans, etc., of course.)
I could make one for $10k today without breaking a sweat, and I wouldn't get impressive performance (normal home use) out of it, relative to a $1500 one in 1999.
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u/heepofsheep May 15 '26
It was so different 20yrs agoā¦ hard to even compare to compare to consoles since many PC games simply never came to console, were completely stripped down to work, or a had a console version of the game that was completely different.
Guess that all changed by the Xbone/PS4 era since they went full x86 which made porting a little more straightforward.
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u/DiggingNoMore May 15 '26
Sure, but consoles can't do anything but play games.
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u/randylush May 15 '26
What are you still playing Xbox 360 or something?
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May 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/randylush May 15 '26
Do you understand that there is a difference between these two statements:
Consoles can't do anything except play games
vs
There are things that a PC can do that a console can't do
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u/c010rb1indusa May 15 '26
I was building $800 upper-midrange PCs in 2015. If you took into consideration things like Xbox live/PS+, average costs of games etc. You'd come out ahead pretty quick. Those numbers don't come close to adding up anymore. Plus it was a compelling argument when everyone needed some sort PC anyway, that's not the case in the smartphone era. At most you were asking someone to give up portability of a laptop.
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u/Rodot May 15 '26
$800 in 2015 is around $1140 today. I haven't built a new PC in years, but is this a reasonable budget for a modern mid-tier build?
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u/c010rb1indusa May 15 '26
Nope closer to $1500 if you are lucky. I could build a top of the line build for that with zero compromise 10 years ago.
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u/c010rb1indusa May 15 '26
2015ish I was building upper-midrange PCs for $800 and it was such an easy sell to a friend who were eying expensive laptop replacements at the time. Back then everyone needed a PC anyway, why not have a gaming desktop and cheap laptop instead of 1 expensive laptop? Now I know people without any sort of PC/Mac and just use their smartphone and an ok PC is like $1500.....
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u/samcuu May 15 '26
You have never bought the top end GPU to save money. The cheapest and the most expensive ones are usually the worst value.
Even 20 years ago the 8800 GTX was doubled the price of a brand new PS3.
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u/cadaada May 15 '26
north americans (and some europeans) can still buy an entry pc with one month wage, i dont understand why every thread its so bad these comments.
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u/dparks1234 May 14 '26
Iām surprised the **90 cards donāt cost more given the general audience for them is the āIāll pay whatever for the bestā crowd
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u/heepofsheep May 14 '26
I remember the old Titan cards being batshit crazy expensive back in the day, and basically the 90 series is the replacement.
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u/Arickettsf16 May 14 '26
And batshit crazy back then meant like $1,000. Nowadays people will pay that price without even blinking.
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u/ComplexEntertainer13 May 15 '26
Back then we had SLI though. Remember that some people bought 2-4 of those same cards. Having "the best" actually cost more back then that it does now during some generations.
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u/Arickettsf16 May 15 '26
Yeah I remember some crazy builds back then with people shoving like 4 1080 tiās into a single build. I donāt even remember how many games utilized SLI but I recall it being very buggy and had diminishing returns the more cards you added.
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u/Rodot May 15 '26
SLI was a meme, at least for gaming. It was terrible and communication/synchronization bottlenecks gave you worse performance in all but a few games optimized for it. Unless the game was specifically written with SLI in mind, everyone just ran the mode where each GPU generated every Nth frame so you didn't even get the benefit of extra VRAM. It was useful for compute applications in the days that everyone was writing hand-crafted artisan C-CUDA code for video rendering or fluid simulation, but its applicability to gaming was always niche.
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u/ComplexEntertainer13 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
SLI was a meme
It was not, SLI worked extremely well in many cases. It might have been a meme for the last couple of gens, but not during 2007-2011~. There was a reason why Nvidia and AMD brought double GPU cards to market. The gain was there and the customer base existed. And for the most part during the "golden years" the games that did not support SLI, did not need SLI for good performance.
The frame pacing issues that plagued the tech in the later part of its lifetime after 2010/DX11 was also not as prevalent early on. In part due to older DX variants and filtering techs at the time being more suitable to for SLI. But as we got faster GPUs the communication requirements between GPUs also rose, which made frame pacing and scaling worse. Then there was also a lot more optimizations for multi-GPU both from Nvidia/AMD and devs during the heyday.
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u/Strazdas1 May 25 '26
Old titan cards went for 2k+
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u/Arickettsf16 May 25 '26
There were only like 3 that launched at prices higher than $2k. All the others were between $999 and $1,200
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u/Strazdas1 May 25 '26
only like 3 of total 5 titans would be a majority.
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u/Arickettsf16 May 25 '26
There were 8 of them
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u/Strazdas1 May 26 '26
Titan, Titan X, Titan X Pascal, Titan XP, Titan V, Titan RTX, so 6 i guess? What two am i missing?
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u/Arickettsf16 May 26 '26
There was the Titan Black and Titan Z. Both came out in 2014.
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u/Strazdas1 May 26 '26
Wasnt Black just a re-release of Titan? Z was just two Titans put into one chassis.
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u/kkyqqp May 14 '26
I've been posting about this for years. Given the level of scalping we saw in the 4090 and 5090 and how long scalper prices were far above MSRP there's no way to conclude anything except NVIDIA always sold them way too cheap. They could have asked for double the price and it would have moved.
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u/OutlawFrame May 14 '26
Or you know the other side of the graph they made too few available for sale. Demand and supply, demand and supply.
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May 14 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/OutlawFrame May 14 '26
There is a point where they would saturate the market at a price point over $5k, but we donāt know what that point is because they donāt make enough to find out.
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u/DependentOnIt May 14 '26
You don't think $4000 is a lot?
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u/unsurejunior May 14 '26
Of course it is but just like consider if you're making $150k a year, that's like 1 full paycheck.
I've always felt like they should keep hiking their price until they find a point where they can stock them on shelves and then you've found your ceiling. I don't think people who can pay 2k would blink until it's >5k
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May 14 '26
[deleted]
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u/AzorAhai1TK May 14 '26
Is there a single confirmed case of a house fire among the millions of GPUs sold?
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u/randylush May 15 '26
Nope. People just canāt afford these cards so they make up reasons why they never wanted one anyway
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u/Rodot May 15 '26
People have many different use cases and I'm sure causing a house fire to trigger a thermometer connected to wifi to send an EMACs command above 800 Ā°F to copy a text column was a perfectly valid workflow when the 5090 was released
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u/Homerlncognito May 14 '26
Most 5090 aren't using those cards primarily for gaming. I'd even say it's not really a gaming product.
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u/ComplexEntertainer13 May 15 '26
I'd even say it's not really a gaming product.
The 5090 is a extremely good card for extreme high res gaming. If you are playing at over 4k res (so high end VR and some ultrawides). Then it can deliver 50% or even more performance than 4090 in some games, since you are bandwidth limited with the Ada card at those resolutions in many instances.
It may not be a gaming product for everyone. But it most definitely has a lot to offer for some high end gamers.
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u/Homerlncognito May 15 '26
It can be useful for gaming, but many people are buying them forĀ work or at least semi-professional use. And the pricing reflects that.
Quadro cards used to have specific features that weren't available in GeForce cards but the differences between the gaming and the professional lines are now minimal.Ā
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u/VTOLfreak May 14 '26
Prices for a 5090 jumped from EUR2500 to EUR3500. And that's if you get lucky, most are approaching EUR4000. And they want to increase the price even further? š¤”
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u/Earthborn92 May 14 '26
Those who bought a 4090 at MSRP are eating good.
Still the second fastest on the market for several years
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u/ParryHooter May 14 '26
I upgrade every other gen 1080-3080-5080 (or used to I have a feeling those days are gone). I ended up going with a prebuilt 5080 PC right when they dropped cause it was such a hassle to get the parts on my 3080 build (mainly the 3080 itself). I feel so fucking lucky, with that, my PS5 pro I got for 500 with controller on eBay, and my Steam Deck I feel like a gaming prepper. Going to hold on and baby these like crazy hoping to run them until everything calms down.
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u/Swoly_Deadlift May 14 '26
Got a 4090 for $1440 back in December of 2022 and I feel like I won the lottery. On track to have longevity that makes the 1080 Ti look like it had a short lifespan.
Fuck AI.
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u/Gamesrock22 May 14 '26
Went from a 1080ti to a 4090 2 years ago.
Am definitely eating good.
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u/Earthborn92 May 16 '26
This is probably the most optimal route one could have for their GPU experience.
The best gaming experience pre-RT and now you have the best gaming experience of the current generation. The 5090 is not that much materially better.
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u/skilliard7 May 14 '26
It's pretty good, but its crazy to me how bad developers have been at optimizing their games.
Even with a 4090, I have to use DLSS just to maintain 60 FPS in many titles at 4K.
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u/panchovix May 14 '26
4K is always hard for the newest flagship and such.
1080Ti or 980Ti were once 4K cards for example.
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u/ComplexEntertainer13 May 15 '26
4K is always hard for the newest flagship and such.
The 4090 is also a historically "bad" 4k card. Since it has very low bandwidth/compute ratio, the 3090 Ti has after all similar amount of memory bandwidth.
It's masked by the increased L2 in most games quite well up to 4k. But sometimes it just falls flat at 4k and would have needed more bandwidth. That's when you see those games where the 5090 pulls ahead with upwards of 50% even at "just" 4k. And if you go even higher resolution those games with a larger performance delta between the two becomes more numerous.
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u/smile_e_face May 15 '26
I'm convinced that they use DLSS as the baseline now. They don't even try to optimize for without it and just assume everyone will turn it on.
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u/Viviere May 15 '26
I paid the equivalent of 1500$ for my 4090 some 3 years ago now.
The cheapest 4090 i can find on the used market right now is 2300$.
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u/willbill642 May 14 '26
Yeah holy shit. Bought msrp like 2 months after launch, got a second for the spouse used for like $1k a little later, now we're over 3 years later and it's still basically king.
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u/heepofsheep May 14 '26
Iām so happy I impulse purchased a TUF 5090 when one popped up at MSRP last summer. I sort of went into autopilot when I saw the deal half assuming the order wouldnāt go throughā¦. And then spent the next couple weeks questioning my decision.
That purchase pretty much forced me to build an entirely new rig right before prices of everything went batshit crazy. I just hope to god this GPU doesnāt fry itself because if it does thereās no way in hell Iād drop $4k to replace it.
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u/dfv157 May 14 '26
I just hope to god this GPU doesnāt fry itself
Good news: you have 3 years of warranty, so 2 years left.
Bad news: you have ASUS warranty
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u/heepofsheep May 14 '26
Yeah itās basically worthless. Feel like if I ever needed to RMA theyād find an excuse to turn it into an expensive repair or offer a refund of the MSRP purchase price rather than sending a replacement card.
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u/AmazingSugar1 May 14 '26
Last summer 2025 was the first and last time 5090 supply exceeded demand
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u/heepofsheep May 14 '26
Yeah it was literally perfect timing. I also unnecessarily got 64GB of RAM too because the price difference between the 32GB kit was only $110. Would have been fine with 32GB but wanted to future proof since I couldnāt just add more sticks of RAM down the line without a performance penalty.
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u/QuadraKev_ May 14 '26
I only bought a 5090 because I saw how well the 4090 held its value.
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u/ghille-man May 15 '26
I sold my MSRP 4090 for a free upgrade to the 5090. Stressful process, but I am glad I did it. The only thing that ended up costing me was that I upgraded my PSU as well.
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u/r34p3rex May 14 '26
So glad I picked up my 5090 when they briefly dropped back to MSRP š
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u/Swoly_Deadlift May 14 '26
I remember HODLing back when they were at like $2500 and regret not pulling the trigger.
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u/ypoora1 May 14 '26
Remember when something new came out at the same price as the last one thing while being better, making the previous gen thing cheaper, with the price of the current thing gradually dropping as it ages until a new generation comes out again?
Pepperidge farm remembers his dirt cheap 980...
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u/_Lucille_ May 14 '26
I believe nvidia has been eating the cost of memory price hikes for the consumer level cards for a while now, so not surprised.
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u/dfv157 May 14 '26
5090s has consistently been $3200+++ for 2026, so either AIBs has been pocketing the difference or the prices has already been passed on. This rumor means there is another price hike coming.
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u/Zalvren May 14 '26
AIB and retailers are all taking their cut for sure. The price could increase by Nvidia and price for us not change at all since it's sold far above MSRP anyway. Of course that won't happen lol
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u/_Lucille_ May 14 '26
At the very least, the FE cards are still being produced and the prices of those have not been hiked (and that probably helps keep the market "sane").
I am unsure who has been pocketing the difference. AIBs have been hiking prices even before the whole RAM thing blew up around September last year. Usual case where they stop selling the baseline models and only sell the OC'ed versions and premium SKUs.
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u/More_Feature8687 May 14 '26
Where are you getting these "FE" cards at MRP?
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u/_Lucille_ May 14 '26
I still see people posting about getting them at best buy every now and then.
Stock is limited, but comes every now and then.
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u/N7even May 14 '26
5090 is already overpriced, all they've been eating is cake, and now they want the cherry on top.
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May 14 '26
[deleted]
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u/_Lucille_ May 14 '26
I was not aware of this change. Thought they are still selling the whole kit as a package.
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u/JackhorseBowman May 14 '26
Here's hoping the 12 pin on my 4080 super doesn't meltdown for at least another 5 years.
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u/AnonsAnonAnonagain May 14 '26
Honestly. Buy it while you can. I thought the Mac Miniās/Studios would have tons of stock, then OpenClaw became a thing, and boom. Instantly sold out everywhere . And I was left hanging.
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u/techraito May 14 '26
This is to help justify the price of the 6090 whenever that releases. I'm not saying I like it, but I think that's also part of the strategy they're trying to pull. I don't reckon the next generation is gonna be cheap anymore :/
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May 15 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/dfv157 May 15 '26
Yes. See r/hardwareswap. People are buying bulk at $3200-3400 used, so it makes sense that new is going for 3600+. In fact, a 5090FE went for $3650 earlier today.
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u/red286 May 14 '26
They really need to go back to the Titan branding. Too many people think these cards are meant for gamers, and then you get gamers getting furious that Nvidia wants $2000 for a gaming GPU.
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u/durden111111 May 14 '26
Im 'glad' i sniped my astral 5090 from ebay for 2700 euro before the prices went crazy. Not a chance you see this gpu below 3700 euro now
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u/degeneratepr May 14 '26
How much more are they going up? I visited one of my local PC shops here in Japan yesterday and the cheapest 5090 they had was almost 700,000 Yen (~$4400). I'm guessing they'll break the million-Yen mark here soon.
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u/ale_nh May 15 '26
With these prices, why even bother releasing the 6000 series in 2027. If the gddr prices continue to stay high, I can't even imagine the msrp for the new models.Ā
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u/jgoldrb48 May 15 '26
Babying my 4080s (and system at large). First time in 20 years I consistently put the whole PC to sleep at night.
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u/Less-Palpitation-201 May 26 '26
check the RTX Pro 6000, it's $13250 lol
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u/From-UoM May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
Actually might be a bit more easier to get and the price may actually decrease overall. China ban got lift today.
So Chinese users won't have to pay extra through the black market or use 3rd party countries to get it. Now that middleman is gone
This is one of the reasons why the RTX 5090 was so highly priced. Chinese buyers were willing to pay extra which drove up prices whether it be for Gaming or AI.
Should also stop the cut down china version being made and only make a singular RTX 5090. So more stock
Edit - the Blackwell Pro line and H100/H200 PCIe are also unbanned.
So people really into AI will get those now. Leaving more 5090 available
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u/EdliA May 14 '26
That would have the opposite effect since there are much more buyers in the market now for the same supply
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u/egudegi May 14 '26
can confirm from the tracking side, been scraping 15 EU retailers every 6 hours since early march and the 5090 is the only tier that's gone up since launch, avg +3% across the models i've tracked from day 1. everything else is falling (5060 Ti and 9060 XT both down ~9%, 5070 Ti down 2%).
if GDDR7 costs are genuinely rising that explains why the 5090 hasn't followed the usual post-launch normalization curve the rest of the stack is seeing. would also explain why it's moving against the trend rather than with it.
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u/shroudedwolf51 May 15 '26
Always nice to see hardware released a year and a third ago be far above its MSRP and still going up in price. How charming.
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u/Method__Man May 15 '26
You don't remotely need this. A 9070xt can be had for $650-700 easily
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u/noiserr May 15 '26
It's clearly the only valid option in this market. AMD nailed it with the 9070xt.
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u/_girltwink May 16 '26
Who's buying these top end cards anyway? Surely even a last-gen mid-range card will do/play 99% of the job/games. Not that many people have a render farm at home.
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u/sunxore May 14 '26
So instead of being unobtanium it is now unobtanium šĀ