The grotesque price gouging of the RTX 5070 Ti is turning this launch into the Blackwell GPU screwjob

The new Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti has been both an exciting and utterly depressing graphics card to review. I’ve spent the past week testing multiple versions of the new tertiary RTX Blackwell card, and it’s absolutely my favourite of the lot. It’s got that Multi Frame Gen good stuff, runs cool and quiet, and has an absolute ton of easy overclocking headroom.

But it’s a real GPU screwjob for PC gamers when it comes to the pricing you’re going to find out at retail.

Some $749 GPUs might be visible for a couple of picoseconds, but the vast majority of the RTX 5070 Ti cards you’re going to see around launch will be priced waaaaaay higher. I had hoped the earlier listing prices we’d seen were mistakes or placeholders, but no, pretty much every manufacturer on the planet is looking to cash in on the scarcity of the RTX 50-series by putting an offensively high price premium on this third-tier graphics card.

The MSI RTX 5070 Ti Gaming Trio OC Plus, with its $970 price tag set by the manufacturer, is as bad as I’ve seen. And that’s before it gets into retail, so who knows what sort of price it might actually end up being listed at. That’s over $200 more than the standard MSRP and it performs no faster, overclocks no better than the $749 card Nvidia supplied via MSI for my initial RTX 5070 Ti review. MSI isn’t alone, either, as I know Asus’ Prime card is going to be well over MSRP, and it’s TUF Gaming SKU will be north of $900, too.

Yet, at first blush the RTX 5070 Ti seemed like a moderately consumer-friendly graphics card. It was nominally $50 cheaper than the RTX 4070 Ti Super with its $749 MSRP, and notably a lot cheaper than the RTX 5080.

As it’s based on the same GB203 GPU, however, it’s possible to overclock the hell out of the card and bring it within single digit percentage points of the gaming performance of the $999 RTX 5080. For me, that’s a win. Sure, that $749 price point is still high, but if you’re in the market for a new high-end graphics card, this is absolutely going to be the one to buy unless you’re willing to sell every kidney in your family to get an RTX 5090.

So long as you don’t mind spending ten minutes with MSI Afterburner you’ll get the sorts of frame rates that absolutely convince me there’s no commensurate gaming benefit to spending another $250-odd on an RTX 5080. Of course that card can overclock, too, but since the paper-thin launch, prices for those cards have been stupidly high, not least because the scalpers are out in force again.

But sadly, that is only going to happen again, severely tarnishing the launch of the RTX 5070 Ti with absurdly high prices. These aren’t the retailers alone cashing in on their low stock allocations, either, these are set prices from the manufacturers themselves. Which means it might get even worse than we’ve seen so far. I can almost guarantee there will be $1,000+ RTX 5070 Ti SKUs on the shelves.

Though I don’t know of any real solution; it is, after all, just cold capitalism and the laws of supply and demand. A commodity is scarce, so the market sets the price, no matter what Nvidia might have picked as a base price for the card. In a way, you can’t blame companies for trying to get the most money out of limited stock, but it’s the levels they’re going to which I find offensive.

Maybe if there was a Founders Edition for the RTX 5070 Ti that would have helped, but FE stock would have surely sold out as quick as the few MSRP cards going on sale today.

As with the pandemic-based GPU crisis, everybody in the chain is looking greedily at the opportunity to squeeze their own bit of extra cash from the new cards—from the manufacturers, to the retailers, to the scalpers. And who is it that really pays the price? PC gamers, always.

But don’t. Just don’t. Please, do not pay the price. That’s all I ask.