Gamers don’t need a $5,000 RTX 5090 anyway. DLSS got good enough

When the RTX 5090 launched almost two years ago, Nvidia slapped a staggering $1,999 price tag on its new flagship. I called it “the most brutally fast graphics card ever,” because it was (and still is). The RTX 5090 delivered a massive leap in raw performance, paired with a mammoth 32GB of cutting-edge GDDR7 memory and Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture.

It was overkill incarnate.

Now? Actually buying an RTX 5090 can cost vastly more than its already-staggering sticker price. In September, a brand-new RTX 5090 had climbed to at least $5,000 in North America. Current U.S. price tracking puts the average even higher.

Five. Thousand. Dollars.

And make no mistake: The RTX 5090 is vastly faster than cheaper graphics cards. This isn’t one of those situations where a $549 GeForce RTX 5070 suddenly matches Nvidia’s flagship if you flip on a magic setting, no matter what Nvidia’s marketing material might say.

It doesn’t.