Remember during the pandemic and the crypto boom, when it was impossible to find a graphics card at retail price? Remember the launch of the RTX 50 series last year when that happened again? Yeah, it seems like the RAM crunch has us reliving painful memories. After conflicting reports of lowered output and canceled card families, the RTX 5090 seems to have all but disappeared from retail shelves.
An informal investigation found that shoppers hoping to find the GeForce RTX 5090—Nvidia’s top-of-the-line graphics card—have basically zero options at US stores if they’re hoping for retail prices. And that’s including the ridiculous markups for AIB cards from companies like Asus and Gigabyte. If you want anything close to the alleged MSRP of $2,000 USD, keep dreaming. (The AIB pricing issue is a separate one, but one that seems moot at the moment.)
VideoCardz.com found zero graphics cards available at the Nvidia base price from any major store, a status that I can sadly confirm for Best Buy, Newegg, and Amazon. There are plenty of RTX 5070 and 5080 cards—notably the least desirable variants of the current series—available at hundreds of dollars above their MSRP. Poking around Newegg, and restricting the search results to Newegg itself without third-party sellers, I found a big goose egg for the 5090.
Technically, RTX 5090 cards can be found from third-party sellers… starting at around $4,360, more than double the intended price. And that’s for a refurbished card, mind you. As VideoCardz.com notes, at that price you might as well just buy a pre-assembled desktop, which is the only place to find these cards without an insane markup at the moment. With that, the rest of the PC is practically free.
Just a few months ago, we were finally seeing high-end graphics cards return to retail prices and actual availability, after shortages through most of 2025. What’s happening? I’ll give you three guesses, but you’ll only need one: it’s the RAM crunch. “AI” data centers are gobbling up the global memory output, leaving practically nothing for consumers.
That’s most visible in packaged laptop and desktop RAM modules, which have tripled and quadrupled in price over the last three months. But it’s raising the prices on almost all consumer electronics, as a crucial and previously affordable component becomes one of the most expensive. The same thing is starting to happen to SSDs and other parts, as memory manufacturers like Micron heavily favor industrial production over consumer memory.
And Nvidia is doing the same thing. Aside from the fact that graphics cards need a lot of memory—there’s 32GB of GDDR7 in the RTX 5090—Nvidia seems to be favoring production of industrial GPUs over consumer models, riding the same train that’s made it into one of the most valuable, powerful corporations on the planet. An Asus representative said that Nvidia is de-emphasizing production of consumer GPUs with 16GB of RAM or more, most notably the RTX 5060 Ti and 5070 Ti… though that statement was quickly walked back.
It’s a bad time to be a PC gamer, at least if you care about playing high-end games—or not going into debt to play them.
Author: Michael Crider
Source: PCWorld
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
