Courting Kings and Emperors with nVidia’s RTX 5000 GPUs

Tell me, how rich are you? If you are rich, then we can be friends. If you are very very rich, I would like to upgrade you to my best friend, and tell you about nVidia’s two newly released hyper-overpriced graphics cards, the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090.

…let us take a closer look:

The Good

The new RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 are extremely powerful, and can play any game on the highest settings on the highest resolution. Crysis 3 has League of Legends framerates on these cards. In fact, all other graphics cards are now a footnote when it comes to performance. If you want the most powerful and most dominant cards, you want these.

The Meh

nVidia is heavily promoting its DLSS 4 (up from DLSS 3), and the marketing hype over DLSS 4 is straddling the border between silliness and insanity. If nVidia does not scrub its DLSS page, you will find them talking about how DLSS 4 will “multiply frame rates by up to 8X”, which is too good not take a screenshot:

Wow, nVidia, those are some… “interesting” claims. Of course, DLSS is still DLSS, and it is delivering fake frames between real frames to inflate your framerate. Reviewers note that DLSS4 has better quality than DLSS3, with less artifacts, so it is not all pure marketing.

That said, please dear reader, do not believe all the hype and marketing! The job of an advertisement is to entice you to buy the product, not to actually deliver on the promises made. If you buy a phone, you get a phone, but you can put it in a mirror-lined box and pretend that it is 4 phones.

Other than DLSS4, reviewers noted that the new cards are in the middle range when it comes to noise: Not very loud, but not quiet either. That is a bit of a shame considering how expensive these cards are. If you prefer a quiet PC, you may wish to look into water-cooling or other options.

The Bad

The RTX 5080 is $1000, which is a very pricey sum. You can buy a good gaming computer, with all the peripherals, for $1000 (see the Very Good tier of our build chart, for example).

The RTX 5090 is $2000, double the price, but only about 40% more powerful.

These are very expensive cards, but the story does not stop there. $1000 and $2000 are only the MSRP, the suggested price. Actual cards are selling for $1300 and $2500! Venturing faaaaaar out into unhinged territory! Who can afford $2500 for just one component of a PC? Did someone find a gold mine and give some gold out to gamers? Did we all become royal sheiks with infinite budgets? I am just Mr. Normalguy, not His Grace Prince Eurodollar, so how do I afford this?

$2500 for a graphics card is a lot. Maybe too much.

Price aside, these cards consume extreme amounts of power, with the 5090 taking in 600W, which means that I have to spell it out in order to confirm that it is not a typo: Six HUNDRED Watts for the GPU alone! That is a tonne of electricity that you need to pay for, and all that heat will turn your gaming room into a sauna unless you cool it heavily… meaning you pay even more when your bill arrives.

So $2500 for a graphics card, and even more money spent on bills!

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, both the 5080 and the 5090 are completely out of stock, everywhere, at all times. After looking at multiple retailers, Gamer Nexus called it a “Paper Launch“. Now to be fair, these are flagship cards, and nVidia’s hype train is a juggernaut that has the fanboys salivating, but it has been a few weeks now and the cards remain completely unobtainable.

So it is $2500 for a graphics card, if you are lucky enough to find one.

Before going forward, I cannot help but notice the difference between this launch, and Intel’s B570 and B580 launch. Where Intel has taken aim at mid-tier cards for normal gamers, nVidia continues to push extreme performance and unbelievably high prices in the wrong direction. Year after year, it just keeps getting worse. Will the RTX 6090 be sold for $3500? Will the RTX 7090 be $7090? And require 7090 Watts?

Going Forward

Despite the fact that these two new cards are “Imperial Palace Dweller”-tier overpriced, they remain the best option in their price range, with no alternatives. Thus, by force and not by choice, we must admit that they are the only logical purchase for people with $1300 or $2500 GPU budgets. As such, in our main build chart:

• • We will add the RTX 5080 to the Extremist tier.
  • We will add the RTX 5090 to the Monstrous tier.
  • We will remove the RTX 4090 from the Monstrous tier.

Let us hope that the mid-tier 50XX cards will be within reach of us mere mortals.

Sources