Image credit: Future)
Graphics card pricing is a contentious topic. Many of us remember the days when a great mid-range GPU wouldn’t run you much beyond $300-$400, and the high-end stuff was still priced somewhat reasonably for most gamers. Halcyon days, my friends, and ripe for reminiscence. It really was better in the good old days, wasn’t it?
It’s a different world now though, one where $1,600+ RTX 4090s roam the lands. However, according to known leaker kopite7kimi, we shouldn’t be expecting a significant chunk of change on top of the MSRP for Nvidia’s upcoming top-end card. They’ve posted an arguably reassuring tweet stating that they “don’t believe there will be a significant price increase for the RTX 5090”.Given the supposed (and truly gargantuan) specs of that particular GPU, this might come as a surprise. After all, with a rumoured 32 GB of GDDR7 across a 512-bit memory bus and potentially 21,760 CUDA cores, if those specs turn out to be accurate we’ll likely be looking at an incredible performer.
Still, there has to be a price ceiling somewhere—and I wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia had already found it with the RTX 4090. While it may have learned that people will pay truly staggering amounts of money for similarly staggering levels of performance from its current-generation efforts, a $2,000 or similar halo card really does seem like it would be a step too far even for very well-off gamers.
That was, after all, the calculation Nvidia made while chasing the covid/GPU scarcity dollar when it released the RTX 3090 Ti. And it rowed back pretty significantly on that when the RTX 4090 was released at $1,600.
That being said, and again assuming that kopite7kimi is correct, I wonder what they classify as “significant”. After all, given the costs we’re talking about overall, an extra $100-$200 over the $1,600 MSRP of the RTX 4090 would only amount to roughly a 6% to 13% increase—and given the specs on offer, whether that’s a significant rise over the previous pricing is a matter of opinion.
That sort of increase seems about right to me, though. A $1,700 to $1,800 RTX 5090 might be much too expensive for many gamers, but RTX 4090s have continued to sell at well beyond that, and there’s likely enough of a market of well-heeled enthusiasts that’ll pay those sort of prices to jump on the most powerful Blackwell-based consumer card.
