As I type these very words, and less than six months after its official launch on January 30, it is at last possible to buy an RTX 5090 for under Nvidia's officially recommended retail price. Cue much rejoicing.
There is, of course, a catch. It all depends on where you live. In the UK, the 5090 has an MSRP of £1,889, but Overclockers UK will do you a Palit GeForce RTX 5090 GameRock 32GB for the piffling sum of £1,879.99.
OK, that's barely under list, but it's under list all the same and a far cry from the ridiculous markups that have been the norm for all too long. Those markups, sadly, still apply in the US, where the 5090's MSRP is ostensibly $1,999 but the GPU has scarcely, if ever, been seen at the price point.
Right now, at Newegg, for instance, the cheapest RTX 5090 is $2,919.99. And even that is progress of sorts. At least you can buy one.
Meanwhile, in Finland, the RTX 5090 has been spotted for 2,299 Euros, a whisker under the official 2,339 Euros EU sticker price. However, a quick search of proshop.fi, the etailer that listed the 5090 below MSRP, indicates that pricing is currently at the 2,399 Euros MSRP, not below it.
But even that is a pretty major advance on the massive markups that prevailed when the 5090 was launched. As for what to make of these developments in a wider context, these prices do seem to indicate that the GPU market is normalising at last.
After numerous shocks, including crypto mining and the pandemic, demand for GPUs and, therefore, pricing have been acutely elevated for years. However, in some territories, graphics cards are now widely available for MSRP.
Indeed, in the UK, pretty much the whole Nvidia RTX 50 lineup can be had at MSRP or below. That said, AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT remains stubbornly pricey, with the cheapest examples in the UK commanding £660 or so, well above the £560 UK MSRP for the card.
Still, the broad trend is towards price normalisation. The US remains something of an exception. It's unclear how much of that is a direct result of tariffs. However, demand for graphics cards probably spiked as gamers and other GPU buyers rushed to snag cards before tariffs hit, layering on yet another extraordinary shock onto an already atypical market.
Should tariffs go back to normal and no other shocks hit the US market, with the broader supply of GPUs now looking pretty healthy, we'd expect even the US to see prices trend toward MSRP. But with the Trump administration's tariff policy shifting wildly on a literally daily basis, that's a rather big if.
