The RTX 5090 returned to the market the way the hero of a revenge film returns in the third act: later than expected, and with a lot more to say about the price. In many of the countries we track, including the US, it was hard to find for up to 20 days, and in some of them close to impossible. Now it is back, in a handful of listings, at prices that make the old ones look friendly.
A word on what we saw. This comes from our own Market Watch data, which covers the shops we monitor. The card may have been for sale somewhere we do not look, but in the US and in Germany we recorded no offer for roughly two weeks. Prices for the RTX 5080, the RTX 5070 Ti and the RTX 4090 kept coming in over the same period, so the silence belonged to the 5090.
As for why, the timing is hard to ignore. In early October, leakers claimed NVIDIA had stopped making the RTX 5090 so its chips could go to professional and data center cards, and a few YouTube channels treated that as settled and told viewers the card was finished. NVIDIA denied it. Jeff Fisher, its senior vice president for personal computing, said after an event in Taipei on October 16 that the card “has definitely not been discontinued,” while admitting that supply is tight, Dexerto reported. We think the rumor did its damage before the denial arrived. A shop or reseller that believes a card is gone for good has every reason to keep its last units in the back room and wait for a better price, and that alone is enough to empty a market that only had a few listings to begin with. Whatever the cause, the card is back, not in large numbers, and well above the price it left at.
The US: $1,999 now reads like an introductory offer
The last US offer before the gap was about $7,000 on October 11, a Gigabyte Gaming OC. The listing that came back on October 24 is the same model, at $7,995 on its first day and about $7,900 now, almost four times the $1,999 launch MSRP. In late September the US market was already down to one listing at $6,700. The market is still down to one listing, and the price is roughly 18 percent higher.
Germany: one Gainward listing at about €8,900
In Germany the card was last seen on October 9 at about €8,100, after sitting between about €5,500 and €6,500 through September and early October. That climb was, in hindsight, the card clearing its throat. Then the listings disappeared, and when one came back on October 24 it asked about €8,900. That is a neat trick for a graphics card: take two weeks off and return with a raise.
The listing is a Gainward GeForce RTX 5090 Phantom GS, roughly 9 percent above the last price before the blackout and 60 percent above early October. Gainward is a Palit Group brand. It is not a limited edition or a halo card, yet it asks more than the market was paying when the lights went out.
The German market today is one shop and one card, which makes the median less a statistic than a name tag. Whatever that shop asks is the price of an RTX 5090 in Germany, and the only competition is the buyer’s patience.
A shelf with one card on it
The reasons the card is scarce and expensive are in our earlier piece on memory and AI demand, and nothing in this week’s data changes them. What changed is the shape of the shelf. A card that is easy to find has a price set by competition. A card that is hard to find has a price set by whoever happens to have it, and a seller with the only card in the country is not obliged to be modest.
Anyone shopping for one is better served by watching the Market Watch page than by refreshing a shop. It shows which offers are live, at what price, and when we last saw them, so the next time the RTX 5090 disappears or reappears, it is visible there with its price.