Looking to get your palms on Nvidia’s RTX 5090 or RTX 5080? Too unhealthy, you’re already too late. Both new RTX 50-series “Blackwell” GPUs went up on the market earlier immediately, and lots of went in a flash.
This wasn’t completely sudden, as Nvidia had launched a warning that inventory for the brand new technology of graphics playing cards was going to be low, with producer MSI even delaying the launch of the RTX 5090 till February 6. Lines had grown lengthy at U.S. distributor Micro Center, the place hopeful consumers camped out for an opportunity at snagging one.
With inventory ranges low, scalpers have overtaken eBay listings for the product, with offered listings of the RTX 5090 reaching over $6,000, a 200% enhance over the $1,999 MSRP of the 5090. Third-party producers are additionally marking up their MSRP costs of the RTX 5090, with the Asus ROG Astral reaching $2,799, a 40% enhance in asking worth. This isn’t unusual for higher-end playing cards, however the $800 enhance is a complete PS5 Pro.
Worldwide, Nvidia’s MSRP Founder’s Edition playing cards, which characteristic a sophisticated cut up PCB, have been in demand, with totally different areas restocking at totally different instances. But, whereas demand stays excessive and inventory ranges stay low they’re almost not possible to buy, even for essentially the most diehard of followers.
One consumer commented on the Nvidia forum: “I refreshed each second since 2pm and never as soon as did it turn into in the stores!!!” Other customers over on Reddit are already posting memes titled “Another Launch, Another Failure” after failing to purchase one of many new graphics playing cards. “Paper launch is true,” claimed one Redditor, echoing the sentiment across the RTX 30-series launch, which was additionally in brief provide in 2020.
But why there are so few RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics playing cards in circulation? In October, it was reported that the designs of Nvidia’s Blackwell-based processors have been flawed. CEO Jensen Huang mentioned: “We had a design flaw in Blackwell, it was useful, however the design flaw precipitated the yield to be low.” Fixing this flaw in its information middle chips could have affected manufacturing for the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 client GPUs.
Nvidia solely has a lot time booked at its chip foundry, TSMC. Nvidia’s Blackwell GeForce playing cards are made utilizing the identical TSMC 4N node, on the identical structure because the affected boards. If yields are low, then it must spend extra time manufacturing working chips. This low yield in its preliminary run of B100 and B200 boards might have had a knock-on impact on different merchandise. As Nvidia hurried to repair the problem and make yields greater toin flip make its information middle clients blissful, client merchandise might need been hit onerous.
After all, the Blackwell B200 chip and the RTX 50-series share the identical general manufacturing course of. Nvidia’s income from its information middle clients reached a staggering $30.8 billion in Q3 2025. By comparability, its gaming revenues sat at simply $3.3 billion.
However, the inventory scenario for Nvidia’s client graphics playing cards will possible get higher sooner or later. For now, Nvidia may need to face a client backlash from players who can’t purchase what we referred to as the “quickest graphics card on the patron market” in our RTX 5090 assessment.
Sayem is a freelancer based mostly within the UK, masking tech & {hardware}. You can get in contact with him at @sayem.zone on Bluesky.