RTX $5090
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
171 points (99.4% liked)
Fuck AI
5188 readers
1855 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This used to be a sarcastic meme.
Now Nvidia is the one laughing.
250% price hikes, the telltale sign of a functioning economy. But don't worry guys, the number is still going up so it's your fault you can't afford our products
US will ban China's new GPUs. I would bet my life on that.
Lol have fun with that. Gaming PC's are dead at these prices, nobody normal is going to be forking out these prices. Only people that are terrible with money would think that's acceptable.
Gaming PC's are dead at these prices
That's the plan. You'll subscribe to your cloud gaming service and you'll fucking like it you disgusting peasant. Own nothing, rent everything.
You ain't wrong, at all. But I'm also putting my foot down with that horseshit as well, no more of that subscription BS to be found here either.
I installed a new garage door opener a few months ago, and when I realized it was asking me for a subscription, I had a category 5 meltdown. I've had it with that shit, I've been cutting those left right and centre. It'll be a cold day in hell when I pay a subscription fee to play games.
I'm not in favor of this bleak future. I don't know why we can't just buy well-made things and fix them ourselves when they are broken. Rather, I know why but I don't know why we allow it to be this way.
I'm just feeling dark and my only hope is that people see my bleak predictions for the future and act now to stop it.
People see next month's crippling rent payment barreling down at them and thats about it.
If that's the plan, then it's not a very good plan. You simply don't need a high end PC for gaming anymore.
You simply don't need a high end PC for gaming anymore.
You mean older gaming PCs can still run most games. I'm sure there will be holdouts and I'm sure lots of smaller, crunchy indie games will run just fine.
Unfortunately, computers are built from common sets of parts. If RAM, SSDs, HDDs, and GPU costs are doubling, then those who can only afford a low or mid-range PC suddenly... can't. So the consumer market collapses. Nobody will bother making replacement parts for your old gaming PC, and when it comes to new there will be only expensive PCs, ludicrously expensive gaming PCs, and the real goal - thin clients. The Chromebook has already become the default consumer PC. They're just coming for a different segment now.
More accurately, they don't fucking care and just want more money. Right now, they're betting on AI but when that bubble bursts, cloud "PCs" is what they'll fall back on since all the hardware and, therefore, all the compute will have moved to the cloud and the market for old-style personal computers will have been blown to shit. Recurrent user spending is reliable and makes investors happy. SAS all the things.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, AI bubble manufactured as part of a push to further centralize computing in general. Lot of perverse incentive to do so, hugely beneficial to those currently in power
Yep, subscriptions all around. You can tell it's bad when even Fox News is arguing against it!
Yes, every business wants to rent your life back to you as a subscription plan, but that doesn’t mean you need to go along with it!
They're not marketing to casual consumers anymore. Their new target is just data centers.
Thankfully most of the top games of 2025 run great on a 4060.
Yeah, I think Indiana Jones got a bit thorny with 8GB VRAM but I think that got patched to work better.
Gaming isn't marketing to casual consumers arguably either. Pay top dollar to buy some product that's not even at alpha stage when it comes to these AAA games, no thanks.
I've got a backlog that's so gosh darn long anyways, this is all perversely actually a good thing in my life. I asked my dad if he wanted a PS5 for his 70th, and he was like nah, me and the PS4 are good. I need to be more like him.
Glad I upgraded beginning of 2025, with the amount of unfinished games and the number of older games I've never played, I'll either ride it out till gaming on PC isn't a thing or prices will get better....hah prices never really come down as we see with Nvidia pricing. Good thing there's a ton of games on Steam I haven't bought and even more I've played less than a couple hours.
I built one in 2020, right when COVID was kicking in. I refreshed it when my daughter was born, because I knew I'd be spending a lot more time closer to home. It's still AM4 but it's pretty stout, so it's going to be seeing out the decade at this point. Maybe even more, as I just don't game as much anymore, and I'm just straight up not paying these prices.
Ye nvidia needs to fuck off. They have no reason to do this, since they dont even supply ram to the board partners anymore.
All price increase is for the board partners, not them. Fuck off nvidia
@Stern Very happy for my 7800XT humming along happily.
7800XT club represent :P
Very happy with its performance, even in heavier games. The 16GB of VRAM helps a ton.
Same here, it's great on Linux.
Recently swapped from a 3080FE to a 9070 XT 16gb, and it runs like a champ (also, seems to run cooler too). And subsequently swapping my machine to bazzite was trivial as a result.
I bought a used one for $350 off FB Marketplace a month ago, and I'm glad I did. I figured all of this would hit GPUs as well, so I rushed to get a good deal on one.
It's been beautiful.
There's plenty good DOS games to still play btw.. add in Amiga and NES emulators and we don't really need this stuff anyway.
We can pretty much emulate anything up to the PS3
And that's a lot of great games
Pretty much no gamer is buying that shit anyway.
The last "top tier" card I owned was the Radeon 7870.
I am happy with 2D games. I just hope game dev studios will stop with super demanding graphics.
Also, Steam Machine and Deck are going to be comically successful and I can already see GabeN laughing his ass off.
5k for a GPU? Are they sniffing glue?
There has to be a point where we stop giving a fuck about graphic capabilities. It feels like we've already peaked, and any further progress in the past several years has been marginal. I mean yes, if you need ultra 4K or 8K or 16K or whatever the fuck they're up to then you're gonna have to drop however much coin they demand. Truth is nobody ever needed graphics on that level especially for video games. Really good games have existed despite having potato graphics, and some of the most visually-stunning games don't have the level of popularity or fandom of some of those potato-quality-graphics games.
When i come across articles like this, i like to think of the early video gaming days when real ingenuity was often what moved the bar. Finding ways to use chips in ways they weren't intended to operate to make them do what the creators wanted. Without those extra layers of friction, it seems more of the attention has shifted to the graphics over the content of the game itself. There's still plenty of good stuff out there no doubt, and graphics do matter but i feel most of the responsibility is on the developers at this point. You don't need the most graphically capable card, and even if you bought it--aren't there still other high-priced items you'll also need to fully unlock it's capabilities? Then you need games that fully take advantage of all those capabilities. This all reminds me of audiophiles in their ever-persistent hunt not only for the perfect combination of equipment, but also the music that's been produced on such a high level as to need such sophisticated equipment to hear the differences in the first place.
We are getting priced out of high-end home computing, in any case.
Why even buy a New graphics card nowadays?
I currently have an rtx 3060ti, and all games that run badly on it won't run better on a more recent card anyway.
You can't outrun bad optimisation, no matter how good the card is. And I don't need to put up with it anyways, I still have a massive backlog of Stalker, RE and hollow knight or even dark souls before I feel any need to touch the absolute liquid dumps that are cronos, Stalker and the like with its 20fps stutters
Also, the stuff that already runs, runs more smoothly.than I ever would need it to.
So, any comparisons I might dig up that show the performance difference between that card and a 5070 are, just nonsense? What?
the grapes are sour anyway
I guess so. Yeah
just nonsense
Sure. I mean, of course it makes sense to pay 600€ so instead of playing hollow knight at 144 fps, I can play hollow knight at 144 fps.
And for the other games, instead of stalker 2 or cronos stuttering unplayably at 20 fps, it now stutters like hell at 40 fps.
I don't see any reason to upgrade. The games I mentioned still run badly on a reasonable new GPU. Everything else, except these games, still run good on my GPU.
Out of curiosity, are you gaming on windows 11? I get ~70fps at 1440 on STALKER 2 on Linux with a 9060xt.
A 9060xt isn't a 3060ti
And no, I played it on Bazzite and Arch. I didn't look at the specific fps, but it stutters beyond enjoyment for me
Who really needs RTX 5090 to live anyway? Everything past 5070 is overpriced special tech that average person doesn't really need.
It is just sad western countries don't have the concept of MRP. At least temporarily you won't have to pay a lot of money.
Since the 5090 has a 12vhpwr connector, there is a high chance you are actually setting your own money on fire.
Also, there's no way that their next generation AI chips will come in at lower price per TFLOPS/ram than those made a couple of months ago. Absurdly, NVidia and US datacenter partners have record inventory levels for undeployed AI chips. A crash in chip/memory prices seems more likely than this scenario playing out.
I could buy an amazing mountain bike for that... And those are already overpriced!