Nvidia has been on a warpath the last few years when it comes to being able to deliver an adequate number of GPUs to its gaming consumers, industry partners, and AI customers. But recent news has increasingly indicated that despite its best efforts, the upcoming RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs (which launch on the January 30, 2025) are expected to share similar stock limitations.
This is hardly new territory with the RTX 4000 series GPUs, including the RTX 4090 in particular commanding a premium over MSRP for nearly all AIB variants, even as the Founder’s Edition remained notoriously hard to find over a year after release. Much of this was attributed to how good the RTX 4090 was with AI workloads, making it an interesting competitive alternative to export-restricted AI chips such as Nvidia’s H100 and A100 GPUs.
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Nvidia has since commented directly on availability concerns, first shared by users working at third party retailers on a variety of forums with Tim@Nvidia, an Nvidia staff member commenting on their official forums:
“We expect significant demand for the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 and believe stock-outs may happen. NVIDIA & our partners are shipping more stock to retail every day to help get GPUs into the hands of gamers.”
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Nvidia’s RTX 5090: The Most Elusive Flagship GPU Yet?
While stocks of the high-end RTX 5080 are also expected to be significantly limited at launch, it seems consumer focus, much like with the previous generation, will be on its flagship GPU, the RTX 5090. Nvidia’s RTX 5090, when it launches, is expected to hold the crown for the fastest consumer-grade GPU for gaming and productivity workloads alike, leveraging its new Blackwell architecture, Nvidia’s DLSS4 enhancements such as Multi Frame Generation, and faster, higher bandwidth GDDR7 memory in tow.
Nvidia’s official response regarding RTX 5000 Series GPUs and their availability. (Source: Nvidia.com)
While retailers such as Newegg have already put out placeholders for the GPU’s AIB partner SKUs, pricing remains elusive even as leaks point to third party RTX 5090 SKUs ranging from as low as $2200 and as high as $2800, with pricing for the liquid-cooled ASUS RTX 5090 Astral OC SKU expected to trump the higher estimate. For reference, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition is expected to cost $2000 but, based on prior launches, might have limited availability versus 3rd party alternatives.
Likewise, the RTX 5080, which sees its Founder’s Edition priced at $1000, is expected to retail from $1140 to $1900 depending on the SKU on offer, showcases a much larger spread as a percentage of its base cost if the leaked prices (via PCPartPicker.com) hold.
Much of the demand for the RTX 5090 and the 5080 is expected to be from power users and productivity users, even as enthusiast gamers are also expected to be first in line to secure a unit. A somewhat expected player is also AI researchers, many of whom will be tempted by the 32GB of VRAM on offer for the RTX 5090, making it great for memory-intensive workloads. Nvidia’s fastest consumer-grade GPU to date is expected to be export-restricted, at least in commercial quantities for the foreseeable future.
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