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Goodbye RTX5090

According to reports, NVIDIA is dropping the RTX5090 in order to focus more on its AI GPUs.

I bet there are a lot of folk who wish they'd stocked up on the RTX5090 when they were (comparatively) cheap. If you had a stash of these things then you'd already be looking at a capital gain of 200% to 300% and within a few more months that may double again due to the halted supply.

There are some units still available here in NZ but prices start at NZ$15,000 and go up. Never the less, it might still be wortwhile to buy one and sit on it for a few months, there could be profits coming your way.

Apparently, NVIDIA's flagship gaming GPU will be a 24GB RTX5080 which will also be unreasonably expensive.

What is a regular computer user to do if they need a new high-performance system or if their current GPU goes titsup?

I shudder to think.

My own video editing rig is chugging along with an RTX3060/12 that I bought when they were barely NZ$500 and although it's nowhere near as fast as a 5000-series card, it's plenty fast enough for what I do.

However, if that card were to fail then I'd be right up shirt-creek without a paddle.

While entry-level cards like the RTX5050 have similar processing power to my 3060, they fall woefully short in VRAM capacity. Video editing 4K footage really requires at least 12GB of VRAM so an 8GB card would not be an option for me.

The cheapest NVIDIA GPU with more than 8GB of VRAM on PBTech's website is the RTX5060Ti at $1551, roughly three times more than I paid for my current card. To be honest, I probably couldn't afford it and would have to try to find a second-hand GPU instead.

In fact the current price crunch is so bad that even the lethargic and near-useless GT1030 with just 2GB of DDR4 VRAM is listed for an eye-watering $251.

Why is that so eye-watering?

Well this is an aged 1000-series card that doesn't even include media codecs and which has less power than a modern iGPU such as those found in Intel and AMD CPUs.

In fact the power of modern iGPUs is perhaps the only thing that may save the desktop market.

My every-day machine has an AMD 5600G which is a six-core, 12-thread CPU with built-in GPU that really does everything I need using Linux for web-surfing, document editing, email, image editing and such. I wouldn't want to try and edit video or play demanding modern games with this setup but to fit a separate GPU to such a system would be unnecessary and wasteful.

Sadly, for those who do need a decent amount of GPU capability, the future looks bleak. Prices will continue to rise as supply is constrained and there seems to be no white knight coming to our rescue. AMD, NVIDIA and even Intel are all far to focused on the real money that is to be had from fleecing the AI industry. Consumer-grade hardware doesn't even figure on their revenue ledgers other than under the heading "sundry".

Now where's that SD card I made for my Raspberry Pi that is loaded with thousands of retro games from "the good old days"?

Carpe Diem folks!

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