We knew stock would be tight, and lo it has come to pass.
Did you manage to grab that RTX 5090 Founders Edition card you covet? I’m guessing probably not considering all the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 cards theoretically on sale today went out of stock in under five minutes.
I was trying to cover the RTX Blackwell launch across the US and UK today, along with the rest of the PC Gamer team, and there we were at 6 am PT, 2 pm UK time, clicking on links and trying to see if we could snaffle new graphics cards into our online baskets as soon as the launch time was upon us.
All to no avail. I managed to squeeze into a queue at Best Buy to stick a Founders Edition of the RTX 5090 into my basket for a few minutes before it kicked me out with an error message.
And every other card we could find on Newegg and Best Buy were gone the instant we clicked on them. Over at Walmart, there was one lonely PNY RTX 5080, but he got snapped up real quick, too.
Even the shockingly over-priced versions, with RTX 5080s costing the same as the RTX 5090 MSRP, had gone out of stock. Though I hope that’s just some sort of listing error and someone hasn’t just paid $2,000 for something that is only marginally faster than an RTX 4080 Super.
It was the same situation over in the UK, where stock was either gone in a few minutes or the retailer sites just completely fell over. Some places had pages claiming stock, but if you clicked through they either fessed up that stock had gone, or there was no way to add a card to your cart anyways.
By my reckoning, it was all done and dusted by 6.05 am PT, 2.05 pm UK. And realistically probably earlier than that—it was just that’s when the sites actually caught up with the fact the cards had been snapped up.
So, is this a success? I guess from the point of view of everyone getting shot of all their stock, it will be seen as a win by both Nvidia and the retailers. How happy anyone who actually wanted a new RTX Blackwell GPU is right now, well, that might be a different matter.
Was it high demand, or low stock? All the pre-release noise was about either low volumes of chips going to manufacturers or low numbers of cards going to retailers. Neither paints a particularly rosy picture of digital shelves packed with new cards. Which is a shame considering Nvidia was reportedly able to choose whenever it wanted to release this new generation of graphics cards, and could surely have picked a point in time where it had managed to put more stock into the channel.
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
Though would there ever be enough stock in the channel? Is it that much better to have sold out in ten minutes over five? There will still be a whole lot of disappointed folk still waiting on restocks.
I would guess Nvidia catching up on orders of its big ol’ Blackwell server GPUs took more priority than the GeForce GPUs. They were all kinda on the same TSMC 4N node, so maybe there was an element of making sure those datacenter customers were looked after first.
Still, there will likely be more stock winding its way to retailers soon enough, and we’ll have new RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti cards coming our way next month, too. So keep an eye on our ‘Where to buy…’ pages if you’re in the market for one of the new cards.
Just please stay away from eBay, eh?
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