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Meanwhile, any Australians looking to pick up an RTX 5090 are likely to struggle if previous launches are anything to go off: stock is often even more limited in Australia than it is in the US and UK.
Right now, major retailers like JB Hi-Fi and Dick Smith don’t appear to have any RTX 5000 cards listed at all, but BPCTech and MWave both have listings and you can sign up for notifications when stock becomes available. Some shoppers may be considering a pre-built system: in that case, you should take a look at EvaTech’s RTX 5000 custom PC page – which, amusingly, contains a stern warning about highly limited day-one stock and a one-per-customer order limit.
While our live updates are geared towards shoppers in the US and UK, I’m going to drop some shopping advice for any eager shoppers dropping in from other English-speaking nations.
Shoppers in Canada are liable to have a hard time picking up an RTX 5000 series card next week, but the best places to look will likely be the Canadian storefronts of Newegg and Best Buy. Walmart may also be worth a look, but it’s not currently showing any listings for new GPUs. Nvidia’s own website helpfully (read: unhelpfully) redirects Canadian users to the US page about the RTX 5000 series, and it’s unclear whether the ‘Notify Me’ system will work for users in Canada – I’m using a VPN to access these sites right now.
Another flagship GPU, another opportunity for my lovely boss (the inimitable Matt Hanson) to dive into some ridiculous 8K gaming goodness.
If the RTX 4090 was the first consumer GPU to truly enable 8K gaming, the RTX 5090 is the one that could finally take it mainstream – in large part due to DLSS 4 and the new Multi Frame Generation feature. In Matt’s testing, he found that the 5090 consistently matched or beat the 4090 while the latter was using frame-gen and the former wasn’t. Turn on Multi Frame Generation, and the 5090 absolutely zooms ahead; it cracks high framerates across multiple games despite the 8K resolution and Ultra graphics presets. Truly magical stuff.
If you haven’t already checked out Newegg’s RTX 5090 stock, do give it a look. It’s running an interesting deal on GPU trade-ins right now, meaning you can clean out your old GPU and upgrade to the 5090 in one go.
Just for fun to see how much I’d get, I plugged my GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Gaming X Trio 12G in and found Newegg would pay me $419 towards a new graphics card. That’s a 20% discount on the 5090’x $1,999 price tag – not bad at all.
If you’re currently rocking an RTX 3000 GPU in your rig and have been contemplating an upgrade once the next-gen cards drop (well, why else would you be here?) – you might want to know that Nvidia is potentially planning some retroactive upgrades to your GPU.
Nvidia VP Bryan Catanzaro recently suggested that it might be possible to bring Frame Generation to RTX 3000 cards, as the new version of Team Green’s frame-gen tech doesn’t rely on the Optical Flow hardware accelerator that enabled the tool in the RTX 4000 generation. Instead, it uses an AI-based solution, something that RTX 3000 cards – with their AI-capable Tensor Cores – could potentially utilize. In order words, that cutting-edge technology might soon be available for users with older GPUs, potentially nixing the need for an immediate upgrade.
Speaking of DLSS… some of you might be sitting there wondering about DLSS 4 and its fancy new Multi Frame Generation tech (the latter of which will be exclusive to RTX 5000 GPUs). The viability of DLSS and other upscaling tools of its ilk has been hotly contested by some sectors of the PC gaming community, some of whom claim that it’s become a crutch – an excuse for Nvidia to dial back generational hardware improvements and for game developers to cheap out on PC optimization.
But if recently released usage data is accurate (and there’s frankly no reason to believe it’s not), it looks like DLSS is here to stay. Thankfully, the new DLSS 4 will be backward compatible with all RTX GPUs back to the 2000 generation – unlike DLSS 3, which was locked to RTX 4000 cards exclusively.
For anyone who’s still on the fence about buying this GPU (although I’m not sure how you ended up here if that’s the case), our Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 review is live for your to read. Our components editor, John Loeffler, gave it 4.5 stars, calling it “the supercar of graphics cards”. He did knock it a bit for its “obscene” power consumption, which exceeded 550W in his testing, but praised its redesigned cooling and slimmer form factor.
Overall, it’s a major step up from the RTX 4090 in terms of performance, even without factoring in DLSS 4, so once that upscaling tech rolls out on launch day, you can expect even better performance.
The new, sleeker RTX 5090 FE design reportedly almost didn’t happen: earlier this week, we spotted a mysterious possible RTX 5090 prototype that was a seriously beefy boy, packing specs beyond the real 5090 and a truly absurd 800W power requirement.
While that prototype remains shrouded in uncertainty, it’s possible that it might rear its head further down the line if Nvidia chooses to resurrect its long-dormant Titan RTX series for professional users.
Fun fact: the RTX 5090 is going to be quite a bit smaller than its predecessor the RTX 4090, despite ostensibly being a more powerful card. Yes, I have to say ‘ostensibly’ because we’re not past the review embargo yet, but come on, we all know it’s going to perform better.
I’m personally over the moon that Nvidia has opted to slim things down for this new high-end GPU, because quite frankly the RTX 4090 was a comically oversized beast of a card regardless of which model you bought. All of the Founders Edition models of every upcoming RTX 5000 card will be certified for Nvidia’s own Small Form Factor Ready scheme, meaning lovers of compact PCs and living-room builds can rejoice.
Over in the UK, retailer Overclockers is currently listing all of its RTX 5090 cards with a healthy £25,000 price tag. Don’t panic – this is almost certainly just a nifty trick to let them put them on sale immediately at 2PM GMT with a simple scheduled price change.
One Overclockers store posted on its Facebook page earlier today with a rather fun image showing stacks of RTX 5090 boxes – although if that’s all the stock they have, perhaps we should be worried about those prices…
If previous RTX launch days are any indication, it’s possible that US stock will sell out near-instantly, but UK stock might stick around for at least a little longer. What can I say; we’re all broke on this side of the pond right now, we can’t all be rushing out to drop a cool two thousand on a new GPU.
However, this could create a potential opportunity for US shoppers – while some UK retailers are either limiting sales to UK buyers only or simply don’t ship overseas, if you know somebody in the UK, you might stand a better chance of getting your hands on a 5090 if you get them to buy it and then ship it across the Atlantic to you. Sure, it might cost you more, but better you give that cash to a friend or colleague than a scalper!
If you’re dead set on getting an RTX 5090 today, though, you’re in for an uphill battle: stock is expected to be extremely thin on the ground at both physical stores and digital retailers, with a legion of scalpers no doubt prepping their bots as I type this. Pricing is expected to sit above the $1,999 / £1,939 / AU$4,039 MSRP for most (if not all) third-party models, and you can bet that the first-party Founders Edition cards from Nvidia will sell out like hot cakes.
Still, there are measures you can take: make sure you’re signed up for stock alert notifications at every retailer that’s offering them, and be prepared to mash F5 when the expected 9AM ET / 6AM PST / 2PM GMT launch time rolls around.
I’m very excited now. The anticipation. We’re less than 90 minutes away from stock dropping at all major retailers in the US, UK, and beyond, so get ready to start hitting refresh on some online storefronts.
From early examinations of leaks and rumors (and our knowledge of how things went down during previous Nvidia GPU launches) I’ve concluded that it’s highly likely that RTX 5080 stock will be at least a bit more plentiful, so consider checking out our Where to Buy the RTX 5080 page to improve your odds of getting a new graphics card today.
After all, our RTX 5080 review concluded that it’s a stellar high-end GPU that should sit comfortably inside any PC gamer’s custom build for years to come, so it’s worthy of your consideration.
