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And honestly, it doesn’t seem that surprising when you consider that the RTX 5090 launched with an MSRP of $1,999 yet regularly sold for upwards of $5,000, due in no small part to massive demand from AI-pilled coders and companies looking to take advantage of that sweet, sweet 32GB of DDR7 memory. A casual search of the major retailers this week turned up precisely zero 5090 cards available for purchase, even at that exorbitant price, and I suspect that will remain true for the foreseeable future.
It can feel heartbreaking if you’re dedicated to the hardcore DIY PC gaming lifestyle, but you can take solace in the fact that the GeForce RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 are still widely available and plenty good enough for high-res, high-speed PC gaming. Heck, the same leak that suggests the RTX 5090 is done for also claims that Nvidia will launch a new model of RTX 5080 with 24GB of DDR7 memory, which should offer a noticeable improvement over the current 16GB RTX 5080 cards.
But I have to say, the sooner you make peace with the fact that Nvidia is no longer in the business of supporting PC gaming, the better. Don’t get me wrong, Nvidia will continue to make new desktop graphics cards and talk a big game about how it values PC game players first and foremost. But the numbers have shown otherwise for some time, and that’s likely to continue for years to come.
After all, the AI-driven explosion of demand for high-end GPUs and silicon helped Nvidia become the first trillion-dollar chip company, and recent financial reports and SEC filings show the company’s revenue from data center products is now 4-5x that of its consumer hardware revenue. That’s presumably part of the reason why the company recently stopped reporting GPU sales as a discrete category entirely, instead lumping all GPU hardware sales (for both commercial and retail customers) into one category on its balance sheet alongside robotics, automotive and telecom products.
So please, for your own mental health, I’m begging you: do not give in to Jensen’s sales pitches at the next Nvidia press conference. I believe the company will keep making new graphics cards for the foreseeable future, but only to hold on to its commanding hold of the GPU market and keep up appearances while it milks the AI boom for all its worth. If AI demand collapses the way crypto seemed to crash a few years ago, maybe we’ll see Nvidia take up the mantle of being a PC gaming company once again.
But I don’t expect that will happen any time soon, and making peace with that has done wonders for the stress I feel right now as a frustrated fan of PC gaming. It’s helped me realize that I don’t need the latest and greatest hardware to have a blast gaming on my PC, and the same can be true for you. Take this time to play some games in your Steam(ing) pile of shame, get deeper into Linux gaming and explore all the other cool things you can do without an RTX 5090. Because I don’t know that high-end GPUs will be affordable for regular folks like you and me in the next few years, if ever—and I don’t think I’ll be buying an Nvidia GPU any time in the near future.