The Nvidia RTX 5090 is dead, but it's so expensive that it doesn't really matter

While the RTX 5090 was already hard enough to get at a decent price, new leaks suggest that Nvidia is discontinuing its flagship graphics card.

GPU leaker zed__wang posted on Twitter about the RTX 5090 saying, "GB202 is no longer confirmed for the 5090." They then followed up with a tweet quoting, "All future GB202 accessories are RTX Pro exclusives."

For the uninitiated, the GB202 is the name of the actual GPU that powers the RTX 5090, and it always delivers more power than the RTX 5090. Instead, the GB202 powers nine discrete graphics workstations and data centers, according to TechPowerUp. So it shouldn't be too surprising that Nvidia prefers to prioritize much more expensive graphics cards like the Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell, which costs around $18,000, over the RTX 5090, which is currently around $9,000 on Newegg.

Nvidia also hasn't been shy about prioritizing AI over gaming, as the company has dropped gaming from its earnings report and relegated it to the "edge computing" category.

But, while the leak suggests that the RTX 5090 has been discontinued, it's anything but. Nvidia has not commented on the removal of its flagship card. That doesn't mean much on the surface, but if you look back in February, there were similar rumors about the RTX 5070 Ti, and no matter how convincing those leaks were, they ended up being completely false.

I've asked Nvidia for a comment and will update this article if I hear back, but I suspect the situation with the RTX 5090 is very similar. At the time, production of the RTX 5070 Ti was discontinued as VRAM was prioritized for data centers, but the RTX 5070 Ti itself was not discontinued. It's likely to be a similar story for the RTX 5090, with new units gradually dropping as prices continue to rise.

Either way, for most people, the RTX 5090 has effectively been discontinued for months, if not the entire year. It seems like a distant memory at this point, but the RTX 5090 was launched in January 2025 for $1,999, but that price has skyrocketed since then. Now, the price of that graphics card is closer to the $10,000 mark, and while there are definitely people who can invest that kind of money in their PC, for most DIY PC gamers, the RTX 5090 might not be there.

If the RTX 5090 is discontinued, it will mostly affect pre-built gaming PCs. After all, prebuilts with these graphics haven't seen the same astronomical price jump yet, and you can get a decent Alienware tower with a 5090 for less than what it costs to buy a GPU on Newegg right now. But, if Nvidia stops production of the RTX 5090, it will probably stop immediately.

It's unclear what's going to happen with the RTX 5090, but even so, it's hard to imagine a world where the high-end GPU doesn't continue to drop in price as RAMageddon continues. And now that Nvidia is rumored to not be launching its next-gen graphics cards until 2028, it could be a long time before any high-end GPUs are reasonably priced – even if they do again.