The RTX 4090 Launched Four Years Ago Today, and Now Rumors Say the RTX 5090 Will Be Released Soon. I Cannot Look at It With a Warm Glow

Times Have Changed.

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Join me in saying "Happy Birthday" to the RTX 4090, Nvidia's previous-generation enthusiast-level graphics card. It launched four years ago today, October 12, with an impressive MSRP of $1,499.

Well, impressive for that time. The cheapest RTX 5080 I can find right now is this Asus Prime variant at $1,640, which is a sure sign of how things have changed in the last four years. When Nvidia's second card is significantly more expensive than the MSRP of the previous generation big boy model, it's easy to see how much we've fallen short.

And the RTX 4090's direct replacement, the RTX 5090, has reached near-unobtanium status. We've stopped tracking it on our graphics card price watch page because the only listings are ridiculously priced from third-party sellers that we simply don't recommend. Rumors are now suggesting that Nvidia may have stopped producing RTX 5090 chips for the consumer market and will instead use GB202 silicon for data center and professional GPUs.

Which makes me think of the RTX 4090 with a heavy dose of nostalgia. I recently rummaged through PC Gamer's kit cupboard and came across our review sample, a complete block of a GPU that still looks outrageous today, and that's before you get to the spec sheet, which is still impressive in 2026.

24 GB GDDR6X. 76.3 billion transistors 16,384 CUDA cores, a 56% increase over the RTX 3090. 128 shader modules, 128 ray tracing cores, 512 Tensor cores. It's still a gigantic graphics card, even by modern standards, and I know quite a few gamers who still run it. They bit the bullet and paid the high price at the time and have been enjoying their monster GPU power ever since.

If you had the cash on hand at the time, buying one from the past was a very smart move. Our dev rightly touted its outrageous price tag in his review of the RTX 4090 Founders Edition, but he couldn't help but be impressed with its games - and it also gave us our first proper look at the DLSS frame generation, in its original 2x form.

With all that grunt on offer, combined with a new frame rate assist feature, those who could stomach the price tag got a GPU that still performs like the proverbial mule years later.

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And now an RTX 5080 has more cash and less raw performance (albeit with support for Multi Frame Generation, which seems to have split the room gamer-wise), dropping that much on Nvidia's halo card seems to have worked out well for those who could afford it.

However, the RTX 5090 has always been a more controversial GPU. Launching with an MSRP of $1,999 (and already rising well above that in retailer listings), it's always been more difficult in terms of price/performance metrics - even if it performs significantly better than the RTX 4090.

And again, multi-frame generation is still a moot point for some. Despite being announced alongside the RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 at CES 2025, the RTX 5090 remains the poster boy of this technology. I remember covering the announcement with my colleagues in Las Vegas and wondering how the gaming community would react.

Yes, it significantly increases the number of frames displayed. But it always fueled the "fake frames" debate that was already raging under the performance of the older 2x frame generation. And while the RTX 5090 is still a very powerful GPU on its own, its pricing is sure to leave many gamers out in the cold. Especially if they already had an RTX 4090 in their rig. Why upgrade when your current card was still an absolute monster?

Perhaps this is the legacy of the RTX 4090. The more I think about it, the more I think it might be the last GPU Halo ever made. The average consumer's buying sense danced with a concept we tend to avoid mentioning in this industry - future-proofing, a dirty word I use very carefully here.

Graphics card prices certainly look set to drop for the foreseeable future. And while the RTX 60 series will probably still be a ways off, I can only imagine that anything equivalent to the RTX 6090 will be both ridiculously priced and packed with Tensor cores for more multi-frame generation shenanigans, now with DLSS 5 on top.

As far as Nvidia is concerned, neural rendering is the future. With less focus on improving raw performance, are there more hardware requirements to complement it? This is where my money goes.

Something about the four-year anniversary of Nvidia's legendary 40-series card makes me think back to the days when GPUs were simpler, offering fantastic graphics monsters for sums that were at least somewhat accessible to those of us with more modest salaries.

I know that's a strange thing to say about a four-year-old $1,499 GPU. But the state of graphics card pricing in 2026 has thrown all previous benchmarks into a loop, and there's not much we can do about it. Anyway, raise a glass to the RTX 4090 with me. Somehow I feel that we will never see his like again.

2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB

5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090

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Andy made his first PC game at the age of 12, when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't. 26 years later (yes he's old), he now spends his days writing and reviewing graphics cards, processors, keyboards, mice, gaming headsets and more. You name it, if it's PC gaming hardware, he'll write words about it, with reviews and all.

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