Nvidia's RTX 4090 turns four today, and it's starting to look like the last sane flagship GPU Nvidia ever made.
The card launched October 12, 2022 at $1,499 - steep at the time, but now a rounding error next to current prices. The cheapest RTX 5080 currently available is an Asus Prime model at $1,640, more than the old 4090's launch price for a weaker card. Meanwhile PCGamer says it has pulled the RTX 5090 from its own graphics card price-tracking page, because the only listings left come from third-party sellers charging prices the outlet isn't comfortable recommending. Rumors now suggest Nvidia has shifted the GB202 silicon that powers the 5090 toward data center and professional GPUs instead of consumer cards.
That's the real story here: Nvidia's halo gaming GPU may be getting quietly deprioritized in favor of higher-margin enterprise silicon. If true, it tracks with a broader pattern across this GPU generation, where multi-frame-generation features and AI-workload demand have made the top-end chip more valuable pointed at data centers than at gamers. The RTX 4090, launched with 24GB of GDDR6X and 16,384 CUDA cores, was already the last card where paying a premium bought you something close to future-proofing.
If the 5090 really is on its way out for consumers, don't expect a replacement anytime soon - or a cheaper one.