Nvidia might double down on its pricing strategy

When Nvidia’s RTX 4090 launched at $1,600, the general consensus was that it was too expensive. The RTX 4080 at $1,200 was even worse. Well, hold on to your hat, because according to a new leak, Nvidia might be doubling down on its pricing decisions in a big way. The RTX 5090 is now rumored to cost up to a whopping $2,500.

The leak comes from Moore’s Law Is Dead. According to the sources cited by the YouTuber, the prices of Nvidia’s best graphics cards are going up. The source listed three GPUs, with the RTX 5090 leading the charge with 32GB VRAM. It’s followed by the RTX 5080 with 16GB VRAM, which is the same as the RTX 4080, but this card might sport faster 32Gbps memory modules. Lastly, there’s the RTX 5070, which is said to retain its 12GB memory configuration.

All signs point to the RTX 5090 being pretty insane in terms of performance, but it’s also said to cost a crazy amount of money. The new report puts it in the ballpark of $2,000 to $2,500. Even the lower end of that bracket is a massive price hike, and $2,500 is truly next-level. This would make the RTX 5090 match Nvidia’s most expensive consumer GPU, the Titan RTX, which also launched at $2,500 — a price that was met with a lot of criticism.

The rumored pricing for the RTX 5080 surprised me just as much — if not more. We thought that Nvidia learned its lesson with the RTX 4080 when it released the RTX 4080 Super at $200 less. Now, we’re seemingly back to the previous approach, with the 16GB RTX 5080 said to cost between $1,200 and $1,500.

The RTX 5070, which Moore’s Law Is Dead compares to the RTX 4070 Ti in terms of rasterization, might cost $600 to $700. Sure, that price is less eye-watering than the two higher-end cards, but if you take into consideration that the RTX 5070 might have a minimal generational uplift, the cost starts to feel a bit inflated, too.

If this comes to pass, the RTX 50-series might turn out to be Nvidia’s most expensive generation to date.

No info about RTX 5070 Ti

RTX 5080 performance cannot compete with RTX 4090. RTX 5080D might be cancelled. RTX 5090D is still on track.

RTX 5090/5080 launch in January. RTX 5070 won’t be launched until Febuary. pic.twitter.com/07i799hKIW

— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) October 10, 2024

Meanwhile, harukaze5719 on X (formerly Twitter) speculates that the RTX 5080 won’t be able to compete with the RTX 4090, and that tracks. The specs we’ve seen leaked for the GPU so far point to a mediocre gen-to-gen improvement, and as there’s a big gap between the 4090 and the 4080, the 5080 might not be powerful enough to bridge that.

The one light at the end of the tunnel here is that all of this is subject to change. Wild reports about GPU prices are a regular occurrence before every generation, so the final prices might very well be different. Even Moore’s Law Is Dead says that this could be Nvidia’s way of gauging reactions, so take the above with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Nvidia’s RTX 50-series is said to be announced at CES 2025 in January, with the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080 set to hit the shelves that same month.