A firm denial from Nvidia
Nvidia finally has an answer to the rumour that its flagship graphics card is finished, and it’s a firm no. Jeff Fisher, the company’s senior vice president for personal computing, told reporters in Taipei on October 16 that the GeForce RTX 5090 has not been discontinued and will keep shipping.
That’s welcome, but it doesn’t change much for anyone trying to buy one this week. Supply is still thin, and the prices are absurd.
What Fisher actually said
Fisher was speaking after Nvidia’s RTX Spark launch party in Taipei. According to Taiwanese outlet 4Gamers, he admitted that supply chain capacity is “somewhat constrained” but said Nvidia is going all out to get product to market. “Although there are other variants of the RTX 5090 chip, it really hasn’t been discontinued,” he said, in our translation from Chinese. “Nvidia will continue to ship it, and that’s very important.”
Speaking to Taiwan’s Central News Agency, in a report carried by Newtalk, Fisher called the end-of-life reports “not true” and described the card as a “super important part” of Nvidia’s line-up. He also said the supply squeeze isn’t unique to Nvidia but is hitting the whole industry, and framed it as a matter of principle: without GeForce, he said, there’d be no Nvidia as we know it today.
Nvidia’s own store still doesn’t sell it
When we checked Nvidia’s US marketplace on October 18, it listed RTX 5080, 5070 Ti, 5070, 5060 Ti and 5060 cards, but no RTX 5090 at all. The RTX 5090 product page still says “Starting at $1999”, which is now more of a historical note than a price.
Retail isn’t much better. Tom’s Hardware found Best Buy had no RTX 5090 listings, while Newegg listed cards for about $7,300, apparently from overseas sellers, and third-party sellers on Amazon wanted about $8,500. Micro Center, which we reported was listing the card as “Not Carried” on October 12, still has nothing to sell. In Germany, the lowest price PCGH could find on October 15 was €6,699, according to VideoCardz, against a €2,099 MSRP.
The reports Fisher was answering haven’t gone away
The end-of-life story didn’t come from one source. Two established leakers said production was ending, Taiwan’s BenchLife reported that Nvidia had stopped new GB202 allocations, and PC Games Hardware said it had heard the same from retail and partner sources. Fisher’s line about “other variants” of the chip is interesting here. GB202 also powers Nvidia’s RTX PRO cards, and when memory and wafer supply are tight, it’s no secret where the margin is.
We’d read Fisher’s comments narrowly. “Not discontinued” means Nvidia hasn’t formally killed the card. It doesn’t mean the RTX 5090 will be back at $1,999 any time soon, and Nvidia didn’t put a date or a volume on any of it.
Don’t pay $7,000 for a graphics card
If you were about to panic-buy before the card disappeared, there’s now less reason to. If Nvidia’s word holds, the RTX 5090 isn’t being pulled from sale, so there’s no last-chance premium worth paying. At these prices, it’s better value to wait for supply to recover or to drop down a tier.
The RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti are both on Nvidia’s store, and our RTX 5070 Ti review roundup found that the 5070 Ti is a strong card if you can get it near its $750 list price. That’s not guaranteed, though. Prices across the range have been climbing for months as memory shortages bite, so check what you’re paying against MSRP before you buy anything.
