Nvidia has reportedly ceased selling its GB202 graphics processors for consumer-grade GeForce RTX 5090-series add-in-boards (AIBs), including 'D' variants for the Chinese market, according to a leaked notice from an unknown factory cited by @hongxing2020, who tends to have insights into the graphics card market. Another prominent leaker @Zed__Wang confirmed the report and said that from now on the GB202 silicon will be exclusively used on data center and professional graphics cards.

"According to a notification from the factory, Nvidia will no longer manufacture any RTX 5090 models, including the D variants," a message cited by @hongxing2020 reads. "Going forward, the highest-end GeForce graphics card will be the RTX 5080 24GB, while the RTX 5080 16GB version will be discontinued. Please spread the word."

This is, of course, an unverified claim and not an official Nvidia announcement. We asked Nvidia for a comment, though the company has yet to respond. Typically, Nvidia does not comment on rumors.

While the information is strictly unofficial for now, the alleged decision would make considerable economic sense for Nvidia, as the company can sell GB202 processors on data center and professional graphics cards that cost substantially more than the GeForce RTX 5090. In fact, Nvidia's recently introduced RTX Pro 5500 features the same number of CUDA cores — 21,760 — as the GeForce RTX 5090, but comes with 84GB of GDDR7 memory instead of 32GB and targets considerably more lucrative professional visualization (ProViz) and AI applications. Meanwhile, the fully-fledged RTX 6000 Pro with 24,064 CUDA cores and 96 GB of memory can easily sell for $15,000.

By discontinuing GB202-based GeForce products, Nvidia could prevent its relatively inexpensive consumer graphics cards from competing with its own professional accelerators in the lucrative AI sector. Essentially, the company is redirecting its limited semiconductor manufacturing allocation toward higher-margin products without necessarily sacrificing its position in the gaming market, as neither the GeForce RTX 5080 nor RTX 5090 have direct rivals.

Even if Nvidia has indeed discontinued shipments of GB202 processors for consumer graphics cards, GeForce RTX 5090 boards are unlikely to disappear from the market overnight. Nvidia's add-in-board partners, distributors, and retailers likely have inventories of GPUs and finished graphics cards that could sustain availability for some time. However, if Nvidia no longer supplies GB202 processors for GeForce products, the availability of RTX 5090 cards will inevitably decline, which will affect prices of these AIBs.

Meanwhile, Nvidia could be preparing to refresh its GeForce RTX 50-series lineup. The company has long been rumored to be developing GeForce RTX 50 Super graphics cards, including an RTX 5080 Super with 24GB of GDDR7 memory, although their introduction has reportedly been postponed due to memory supply constraints. The rumored GeForce RTX 5080 24GB could therefore represent a revival of these plans, and with no more GeForce RTX 5090 32GB on the market, the new product will have better memory supply.

Nvidia is also developing its next-generation Rubin-based GeForce RTX 60-series GPUs, but recent rumors suggest that these products will not arrive until late 2027, or even 2028. Consequently, if the reports about the discontinuation of the GeForce RTX 5090 are accurate, Nvidia could leave the enthusiast gaming market without a GB202-class flagship for a considerable period, so if you are in the market for the absolute best graphics card, now is the time to get it.

If you're looking for a new graphics card over Prime Day, then you've no doubt got your fingers and toes crossed, praying that the universe aligns to actually offer some discounts on this much-sought-after bracket of PC hardware. One of the best deals we've spotted today is on a brand-new, current-generation, mid-range graphics card that packs 12GB of VRAM. The Asus ATS Radeon RX 9070 GRE GPU is available at Amazon for a deal price of $529.

Over the past 30 days, the price of this GPU has ranged from $529.99 to $589.99. The current maximum list price is $789.99, but that doesn't reflect the more realistic amount the card has actually been recently selling for. The MSRP launch price for the RX 9070 GRE was $549, so it's amazing to see a GPU that falls below that MSRP threshold in the current economic climate for PC components.

● Check out this deal at Amazon

With 12GB of GDDR6, the RX 9070 GRE sports bandwidth speeds of 18 Gbps on a 192-bit bus, producing 432 GB/s of memory bandwidth for speedy operation in both gaming and application use. Similar to the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, the Radeon RX 9070 GRE is still built on AMD’s RDNA 4 graphics architecture and uses the same Navi 48 GPU; however, the RX 9070 GRE features a cut-down version of the Navi 48 chip with 48 compute units compared to the RX 9070's 56.

AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE sits just behind Nvidia's RTX 5070 in our benchmarking results from our review of the RX 9070 GRE. We found the card to average around 120 frames-per-second at 1080p and about 86.6 FPS at 1440p across our 11-game raster-only test suite.

Combined with a modest power consumption of 220W total power draw, the Radeon RX 9070 GRE is a good GPU choice for 1080p and 1440p gaming, with ample VRAM for playing games on high settings at 1080p, but maybe pushing the limits of 12GB of VRAM when playing with higher settings at 1440p.

So if you're actively looking for a new GPU, then jump on the Asus ATS Radeon RX 9070 GRE for just $529.99; don't hang about, as these lower GPU prices will have the RX 9070 GRE flying off the shelves in the blink of an eye in the current PC component market. To see a graphics card on sale for under its launch MSRP is a very rare sight, and one of the best Prime Day GPU deals out there.

Reddit user u/DallasGrave shared a fix for his RTX 5090, one of the best graphics cards, whose 12VHPWR connector was overheating, along with an image of a module screwed onto the back of his GPU. This module is apparently a custom-made power distributor that splits the current load across more wires to lower connector temperatures. Apparently, u/DallasGrave is connected to GRAVEPC.com, which offers mainly custom cooling solutions for small form-factor PCs.

In response to a commenter asking whether this mod will be covered under PNY’s warranty, he said, “We're a PNY partner. You'll be able to buy a PNY-specific card with a similar modification directly from us with a full warranty.” This mod isn't currently on his website, however. PNY hasn't been great at honoring warranties for the 12VHPWR issue with third-party cables, as covered in this recent story about a third-party cable melting in use, so take the claim of full warranty coverage with a grain of salt.

The 16-pin connector issue plagues many Nvidia graphics cards because they draw high current through what is essentially a 12-pin connector. The four smaller pins are sensors, and the remaining 12 are split between six +12V and ground connections. The connector typically uses high-current-rated 16AWG cables, and in theory, they should handle up to 600W.

Apparently, some cases of these melting connectors are due to poor connections where the pins don't make enough contact, causing high resistance and heat buildup, and uneven current distribution is often a source of issues. This was rarely the case with older multi-8-pin connector setups, as the safety margins were higher. However, graphics cards now draw more current, and Nvidia thought it should run it through fewer wires.

The modder essentially fixed this issue by soldering additional connections to the power rails directly on the RTX 5090’s PCB and routing them to what can only be described as a power distributor. This distributor contains a PCB that the wires connect to and where the two female 8-pin connectors are placed. It is unknown whether the modder designed it himself and whether it contains any other power-delivery or protection components, such as capacitors and fuses.

The distributor appears to be custom-made to fit his specific graphics card, and the housing shows signs of resin printing. In the modder’s stress test, running the card at full load, pulling 550W for 48 hours, he says it “never crossed 40c even at the joint.”

The 12VHPWR connector is a terrible design; cramming that much power into only six wires creates a very sensitive system where slight misalignment and uneven current distribution could cause connector-melting temperatures. This mod is cleaner and more attractive than the other power mods we’ve covered, like this poor Galax RTX 5090, but it is still invasive, requiring wires to be soldered directly to the card’s power rails.

One of the many appeals of retrocomputing and emulation is being able to play your old games on much better systems than you or your parents could afford at the time. Along those lines, techie SupraGSX has brought support for Nvidia's Pascal-era cards (mainly 10-series and Quadro P2000-P6000 cards) to Windows XP 32-bit, with a bevy of modern accouterments for DisplayPort and HDMI handling, too.

The new ForceWare 382.69 (custom numbering) is a spin-off of the existing 368.81 driver, seemingly Nvidia's last Windows XP release that supported 9-series GPUs. The software also pulls card firmware from Quadro 376.84 drivers, and support for Video Protected Region from Windows 7 GeForce 378.78. Although some websites mention that this project was vibe-coded, the repository doesn't mention it, and a cursory look at the build instructions didn't reveal any obvious traces of clanker activity.

Here's the full list of supported cards, taken from the code repository. The one notable omission is GT 1030, based on the GP108 chip. The rest of the lineup is fairly complete, and there's even an experimental build that supports the 1050 Ti. Since the author is releasing new versions as we speak, it's worth checking the project's README for updated information.

• GeForce GTX 970, 980, 980 Ti; GTX TITAN X (Maxwell).
• GeForce GTX 1060 (3/5/6 GB), 1070, 1070 Ti, 1080, 1080 Ti; TITAN X (Pascal), TITAN Xp.
• GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (experimental support)
• Quadro M4000, M5000, M6000, M6000 24GB; P2000, P2200, P4000, P5000, P6000.
• Additional desktop OEM variants of GTX 950 and GTX 960.

Because contemporary displays with high refresh rates and resolutions can be tricky, SupraGSX added DisplayPort HBR2 and HBR3 support (High Bit Rate), HDMI 2.0 identification and mode-retry fail-safes, HDMI/DVI handling, and improved scaling and aspect ratio settings in the Nvidia Control Panel.

Some folks have tested the new driver, and it appears to work mostly fine, with reports of it working well with ultrawide screens at high refresh rates. SupraGSX is active in the Vogons forums, where it seems to take bug reports and feature requests.

If you're interested in revitalizing your retro system with Forceware, you can go to the project's releases section and download the installer package. Enterprising modders can review the extensive build instructions and perhaps roll their own mods.

Since many retro-tinkerers may be asking for Windows XP 64-bit support, a fork of the Forceware driver existed, but it's since been deleted. However, its binaries live on at Mega. Since these are all unofficial drivers, always exercise caution and don't install them on systems where you're concerned about data safety.

Nvidia is tailoring its popular DGX Spark platform and the GB10 SoC to better fit the realities of today's AI models and the broader silicon supply crunch. The company is introducing a 64GB version of the Spark that's meant to be more affordable to local AI trailblazers who just don't need 128GB of RAM.

Back when we first began exploring the capabilities of the DGX Spark and similar systems, the general assumption was that lots of RAM would be necessary to hold the most intelligent models one might want to run, and so unified memory systems built around AMD's Strix Halo, Nvidia's GB10, and Apple's M-series chips could all be configured with 128GB of memory or more.

But the AI field moves fast. Highly intelligent dense models like Qwen 3.8 27B can now fit comfortably within 32GB of RAM (albeit with limited context), so the original Spark's 128GB of memory isn't essential for local inference alone. And skyrocketing RAM prices mean that a chip that’s permanently paired with too much costly LPDDR5X is more of a barrier to entry than an asset. So a more affordable Spark with less RAM makes sense for those who need the capabilities and supporting software stack of Nvidia's GB10 Superchip and can live with less memory.

A "more affordable" DGX Spark is of course relative in today's market. 64GB GB10 systems from Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, and MSI are slated to start at $4999 when they launch on October 23. Given the ever-shifting prices of memory and storage right now, they might not stay there for long. Assuming you can find a 128GB GB10 system in stock, you can expect to pay roughly $7000 to $9000 for one right now, far above even Nvidia's adjusted MSRP.

Memory capacity change aside, 64 GB Sparks will retain the same ConnectX 7 RDMA NIC as their 128 GB stablemates, meaning that they can still be clustered to boost memory capacity and inference performance if a user does eventually outgrow the bounds of 64GB of RAM. The same 20-core Arm CPU complex from the original Spark carries over unchanged, as does the 273 GB/s of shared memory bandwidth for the CPU and GPU.

To help make use of that ConnectX 7 NIC, Nvidia is also making it easier to join Sparks together with a new software tool, the Nvidia Sync Cluster Assistant, that automates the process of yoking those systems together. (Sync is a remote connectivity and management app for the Spark that allows users to use their Spark’s AI horsepower from other Macs and PCs.)

That tool supplements a variety of community-developed utilities that have sprung up over the past year to make clustering a more seamless process, as we used in our experiments with clustering two Dell GB10 systems together earlier this year.

Nvidia is also adding a feature to Sync called Model Launcher that automatically downloads and starts models like the aforementioned Qwen 3.8 27B across one or more systems and links them to the OpenCode browser-based coding agent so that users can start using their local token factories right away for agentic workflows.

The 128GB DGX Spark and Spark-alikes will remain available for those who need space for larger models and for scaling across clusters, or for more memory-hungry local AI work like model fine-tuning, so there’s basically no downside to this addition to the DGX Spark lineup. In today’s volatile market, it’s good to have options, and a 64 GB Spark gives local AI enthusiasts another choice to better fit their budgets and workflows.

A Micro Center customer who bought an RTX 5090 in Tustin, California, was required to sign an Advanced Computing Product Purchaser Declaration form, which bars exporting the GPU, before being approved to purchase the GPU. According to u/Krothic’s post on the r/Microcenter subreddit, they bought a PowerSpec AI90 Workstation with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU, an RTX 5090 Founders Edition GPU, 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM, and a 2TB SSD from the retailer and were surprised when the manager required them to sign the form, which you can see in the post below.

The form requires a prospective RTX 5090 buyer to give their full legal name, residential or business address, government-issued photo ID, phone & email, actual end user (if different from purchaser), location where the product will be installed, and its intended end use. It also says, “NO EXPORT - NO EXCEPTIONS. Micro Center will not sell this product to a purchaser who intends to export, reexport, resell, transfer, or otherwise cause it to leave the United States, regardless of destination.” Micro Center did not mention why it recently began requiring the form, especially as other commenters in the Reddit post said that they weren’t required to do so previously. However, one other person said in the thread that they had to fill out a similar but longer form when they bought a GPU from Central Computers last summer.

Even though GPUs that have the processing power of RTX 4090s or higher were first banned for export to China in November 2023, U.S. authorities only started seriously clamping down on smuggling operations recently. One major arrest, so far, is that of three Supermicro employees, including its co-founder, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, who are suspected of illicitly shipping $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia hardware to China. There have also been anecdotal reports of people buying used RTX 5090s in the U.S. en masse, arriving with testing rigs built into their cars and paying sellers in cash.

It’s unclear how these Micro Center forms will stop or prevent the smuggling of RTX 5090 GPUs, especially as they don’t list the serial number of the GPU being sold. The policy is possibly a deterrent for those who casually purchase high-end equipment like this and sell it to another buyer at a higher price, whether that buyer plans to use it locally or export it illegally.

We have reached out to Micro Center for comment and will update as necessary.

Gears of War: E-Day takes us back to the very beginning of one of the most beloved sagas in gaming: Emergence Day. And to tell this new chapter in the Gears story, developers at The Coalition rebuilt Gears entirely from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5. On top of all-new assets, E-Day is the first shipping title that uses UE5’s MegaLights technology. This tech allows artists to light a space with hundreds of dynamic ray-traced light sources, all in real time.

MegaLights immediately stands out as something different and distinctly next-gen for real-time graphics. Right from the start, Gears of War: E-Day made the hair stand up on the back of my neck with its haunting use of light and shadow. As I fought through the first bloody minutes of Emergence Day with protagonists Marcus and Dom and some new recruits in tow, I was struck by the power of dynamic lighting from sources like the flashing lights on police cars and ambulances.

And as I walked through a ravaged supermarket, I was amazed by the diversity of realistic light sources in the scene, from flickering TVs to fluorescent tubes in the frozen foods aisles. To find out what level of graphics horsepower Gears' incredible presentation demands in exchange for a 60 FPS average, I wiped the Locust guts off and got to testing performance across 43 of our graphics cards to see which GPUs were up to the job.

If you're interested in CPU performance, check out our Gears of War E-Day CPU benchmarks, as well.

Image quality analysis, low to max settings

Gears of War: E-Day offers five quality presets: Low, Medium, High, Ultra, and Ludicrous (seemingly equivalent to Cinematic in other Unreal Engine 5 titles). We captured screenshots at the same location in-game using all five of these presets so you can get a sense of the image quality changes at each one.

If you have to turn down settings to achieve playable performance, I wouldn’t personally go any lower than Medium, as Low brutally crushes the shadows (which may or may not be a bug) and loses a lot of ambient occlusion, creating a sort of cardboard cut-out look on surfaces like the car headlights in the comparison scene above. Check out the rather cartoony-looking destroyed building on the right edge of the frame, too, where the destroyed interior and intact exterior aren’t naturally shadowed.

From Medium on up, the differences are more subtle. Shadows from foliage become softer and more detailed as we move from Medium to High to Ultra, more bounce light might be visible on some surfaces, and textures might be slightly sharper, as expected. But you’re not losing a ton of visual richness if you have to step down to Medium. And as you’ll see in our performance results, that’s a good thing for older and lower-end hardware.

Image quality with RTX Mega Geometry

In addition to Unreal Engine's MegaLights, Gears of War: E-Day is also one of the first titles to ship with Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry tech. Mega Geometry allows for efficient ray-tracing of highly complex meshes like those used for foliage. E-Day exposes Mega Geometry as a toggle, so it’s easy to compare its impact on scenes.

In the examples above, RTX Mega Geometry creates subtle but solid improvements. The most noticeable effect of the feature is that trees have more natural self-shadowing in their cores, and shadows and ambient occlusion on some surfaces can also be visibly improved. We also found that hanging foliage (as can be frequently seen spilling out of planters in the game’s early segments) cast more accurate shadows with the feature enabled, but you’re not generally sticking your nose up close to those objects. Small objects in rubble piles might also show crisper and more accurate shadows, too.

RTX Mega Geometry is technically compatible with graphics cards ranging all the way back to Turing, but Gears will only let you enable it on cards with 12GB of VRAM or more, which wasn’t a common spec before the RTX 40-series family rolled around.

I didn’t have time to test the performance cost of Mega Geometry on every compatible card, but for those I was able to test, I saw a roughly 10% performance cost, and that drop seemed consistent across GPU generations.

If you’re looking for the absolute best image quality with E-Day, I would certainly enable Mega Geometry, especially after creating the side-by-side comparison images above. But this also isn’t a game where you’re standing around and appreciating pretty trees too much, so if you want better performance, you can also leave Mega Geometry off without raining potatoes on Gears’ image quality.

Notes on upscaling and frame generation tech

Gears of War: E-Day is refreshingly vendor-inclusive when it comes to upscaling and frame generation technologies. It features the latest DLSS, FSR, and XeSS tech on compatible graphics cards, as well as Epic's cross-platform TSR upscaling.

As we've come to expect, DLSS upscaling looks the best of the three vendor-specific upscaling solutions. It offers the sharpest and most stable image quality at rest and in motion.

FSR 4 on RX 9000-series and RX 7000-series cards looks great, if a tiny bit less stable on the finest details in motion compared to DLSS. But because you’ll want to steer clear of super-low input resolutions for upscaling to begin with to avoid placing more load on the CPU, DLSS’s current advantages at low input resolutions are less important in this title than they are in Control Resonant, for example. In short, RDNA 4 and RDNA 3 gamers will have a great time with upscaling enabled.

If you’re on an RX 6000-series Radeon, whatever fallback version of FSR is being used in this game is really showing its age. Surfaces visibly boil and crawl when the player is at rest, and high-contrast edges show distracting flickering. This option considerably worsens the presentation of the game.

The cross-platform version of XeSS available to RX 6000 cards doesn’t totally correct these issues, but it looks far better than FSR 2 or 3. If you’re still gaming on an RDNA 2 card and want the best possible image quality, we’d favor Intel’s upscaler.

Frame generation is also available across all three major graphics vendors. DLSS Multi Frame Generation is present and works as expected. AMD’s FSR ML Frame Generation appears to be present, as well, and it works on RX 9000-series cards without a (figurative) hitch.

But if there’s a fallback to an older FSR version for earlier graphics cards, it seems to be broken, as the feature is grayed out on RX 7000 and RX 6000 series cards. We expect that this is a bug or oversight and will be fixed, but it made it hard to see whether framegen was possible or working properly on those older cards.

Finally, for Intel, XeSS 3.0 with Multi Frame Generation is also present and functional, although the level of performance on offer from Arc cards might not be high enough to allow for large amounts of frame generation at acceptable input latencies. Still, XeFG is another handy tool for tuning your Gears experience to taste.

Performance analysis at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K

Since Gears requires RT and takes a mostly vendor-neutral approach to its graphics feature set, the performance story is pretty simple. We don’t have to generate tons of comparison data for RT on and off, and we don’t have to contort various settings to create a scalable workload across GPU vendors.

At 1080p, some clear performance trends immediately emerge. RTX 50-series cards hold a slight raw performance edge in average FPS over Radeon RX 9000-series hardware, but the Radeons demonstrate significantly higher 1% low frame rates.

Subjectively, Gears seems to exhibit more obvious hitches than we’ve seen in a modern game of late, and Nvidia cards might suffer more from that behavior than Radeons, especially at this lower resolution. But on a high-refresh-rate, variable-refresh-rate monitor, those hitches only occasionally poke through on cards from either vendor.

The 1% low superiority of the RX 9000 series isn’t universal, either, as the combination of FSR 4 and RT seems to weigh more heavily on RX 7000-series cards. The RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT would generally land close to the RX 9070 XT, but here they fall below even the RX 9070. The RX 7800 XT also performs more in line with the RX 9060 XT than the RX 9070 GRE here. That’s the price you pay for the superior image quality of FSR 4 on GPUs that lack the matrix math accelerators needed to run the model at its best.

The TL;DR for those seeking a 60 FPS average at the 1080p Ultra preset is that among current-gen cards, you’ll want an RTX 5060 at the bare minimum and preferably an RX 9060 XT or RTX 5060 Ti (at least if you were lucky enough to get one before prices for those products shot through the roof). The RX 9070 GRE and RTX 5070 provide a solid higher-refresh-rate experience, while the RX 9070, RX 9070 XT, and RTX 5070 Ti all clear the 90 FPS mark.

If you want a native 60 FPS-ish average at 2560x1440 Ultra, you need an RX 9070 GRE or RTX 5070 at minimum, and you really want an RX 9070, RX 9070 XT, or RTX 5070 Ti.

But given the broad availability of high-quality upscaling and frame generation options in this game, it’s worth grabbing FrameView (for all vendors) or pulling up the Nvidia Overlay and seeing whether your baseline PC latency is low enough with Quality upscaling (say) to consider adding framegen to the mix on compatible cards. Gears features Nvidia Reflex and responds well to AMD’s Radeon Anti-Lag feature in the driver, so it’s a great candidate for frame generation.

And that’s good news indeed, because at a native 4K Ultra, Gears simply can’t run at a 60 FPS average on anything short of the RTX 5090. The RTX 4090 comes close, but even it could really use a dose of DLSS upscaling and (optionally) frame generation to provide a fluid experience. Lesser hardware will require some personal dialing-in of upscaling and frame generation settings to arrive at the ideal balance between a smooth experience and solid image quality.

Gears of War: E-Day 1080p performance scaling on RTX 3060

The RTX 3060 remains the most popular graphics card on Steam. We've already seen that it isn't well suited to running Gears at native resolution with Ultra settings, so we used it to test performance scaling across all of the game's available presets, both with and without upscaling, to see what a large group of gamers needs to do to achieve a good experience.

At native resolution, not even the Low preset can get the RTX 3060 over the 60 FPS hump. We wouldn't recommend using Low alone to boost performance for the reasons outlined in the image quality analysis earlier in this review. You're giving up a lot of image quality for no good reason when upscaling is available.

You can also see why the maxed-out Ludicrous preset isn't realistic for most cards, as it cuts performance roughly in half versus Ultra. If you're going that route on most GPUs, you will certainly need a dose of upscaling and frame generation, and since the build of Gears we used doesn't expose cross-platform framegen options, you're stuck in the mud on the 3060. (You can't mod in framegen using Optiscaler without risking a ban, either, as Gears uses Easy Anti-Cheat.)

Dialing in DLSS Quality at 1080p affords more freedom for balancing image quality and performance on the RTX 3060. Medium settings plus DLSS Quality gets us over a 60 FPS average with reasonable 1% lows, and we know from our earlier analysis that Medium looks quite a bit better than Low, so this is a fine place to be.

If you're willing to tolerate the potential for larger performance drops, you can even shift up to High, but 1% low frame rates take a big hit, and more demanding scenes might chug a little. We'd stick with Medium for the best all-around experience, but you can choose your own adventure.

Dialing in more aggressive upscaling settings at 1080p to boost performance on the 3060 isn't a great idea, as residual RT noise is already creeping into parts of the scene with DLSS Quality. We'd really love to have DLSS Ray Reconstruction at our disposal here, given the extensive RT effects and poor apparent image quality of Gears' internal densoiser. One can only hope that such an update is coming later.

Bottom line

Gears of War: E-Day is an incredible technical showcase for the PC. As the debut title for Unreal Engine 5’s MegaLights feature, it uses light to gorgeous, often cinematic effect. The dynamic lighting and shadows in this game feel distinctly next-gen. If you obsess over the artistic qualities and usage of light like I do, you will frequently be wowed by the variety and intensity of effects on display. And the assets that those lights fall on mostly look like a million bucks. In short: this game is a feast for the eyes.

In exchange for its jaw-dropping lighting and detail, E-Day requires a strong CPU for the best performance in addition to a powerful graphics card. Check out our full CPU performance analysis for more details.

Given its demands, Gears may have some gamers with older hardware contemplating an upgrade. At a native 1920x1080 Ultra, the ever-popular RTX 3060 falls well short of a 60 FPS average, and anything less powerful than a Radeon RX 7700 XT or RX 6800 XT is also way off that pace.

In our supplementary tests, we found that the RTX 3060 needs 1080p Medium settings and DLSS Quality to clear the 60 FPS bar. But Gears still looks decent at Medium, so you’re not giving up too much eye candy in the bargain.

For a native-res 1080p Ultra and 60 FPS-ish experience, you want an RTX 5060 at a minimum, or a Radeon RX 9060 XT for a considerably smoother ride.

For higher-refresh-rate displays at 1080p, the RX 9070 GRE comes out as a bang-for-the-buck champion, shadowing the RTX 5070 for roughly $300 less at current pricing. And if you want even higher performance, the RX 9070 hits the 90 FPS mark on average for not that much more cash.

At 2560x1440 Ultra, an RTX 5070 or RX 9070 GRE both fall just short of a 60 FPS average, so upscaling or frame generation (or both) may be required to get over the hump. But you really want an RTX 5070 Ti or an RX 9070 XT for the best experience and value.

Native 4K Ultra gaming in this title is practically impossible without frame generation, upscaling, or both. Only the RTX 5090 can clear a 60 FPS average, and the RTX 4090 falls just short. Every other graphics card is way behind, so if 4K is your goal, it’s time to start dialing in those performance boosts.

Since input latency is well-controlled with Nvidia Reflex or AMD’s driver-level Radeon Anti-Lag in this game as a baseline, you can usually enable DLSS FG at will on Nvidia cards (or FSR frame generation with more care) and go about your gory business.

Although this game isn’t an Nvidia-backed path-tracing showcase like many of the headline AAA releases of 2026, GeForce gamers still get one unique feature that Radeon owners don’t. Gears implements RTX Mega Geometry for more accurate RT on objects with lots of fine geometric detail, like leaves and rubble, and it seems to improve shadows and ambient occlusion on some surfaces, too. If you have a GeForce card with 12GB of VRAM or more, Mega Geometry is well worth its roughly 10% performance cost.

Given E-Day’s already extensive integration of Nvidia tech, we really would have liked to see DLSS Ray Reconstruction included in this game. The stock RT denoiser seems far from perfect and leads to visible boil or instability in shadows and reflections, and the overall detail in reflections isn’t quite up to par with what we’d expect. Ray Reconstruction makes a major difference for the quality of those effects in Control Resonant, and we’d like to see what it can do here, too.

But even so, Gears of War: E-Day sets a new high-water mark for what's possible from PC graphics, and I can't wait to dig deeper into the game to see how MegaLights enhances the rest of the experience. Don't be surprised if this title takes a spot in our next GPU Hierarchy update.

The Call Center Doctors, a call center consultancy that builds and runs call floors for other businesses, rented a server with four Nvidia H200 AI GPUs to serve DeepSeek V4.1 Flash to its Claude Code agents in place of Opus 5.5, according to its test write-up. The write-up is aimed at anyone who has heard that DeepSeek is “80x cheaper” than Claude. Using its real coding mix, the firm's server topped out at around 213 tokens written per second at an on-demand cost of $440.88 per day, versus $184–$223 per day for the same work via DeepSeek’s API. The call center went back to Opus 5.5 at a lower price than the box would cost at on-demand rates.

DeepSeek’s API is priced at $0.15 per 1 million new input tokens off-peak, $0.003 cached input tokens, and $0.60 per 1 million output tokens. Peak costs are double. By comparison, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 is listed at $4 input and $20 output per 1 million tokens, with cache reads at $0.20. The consultancy used it through subscriptions and not the API.

The box’s performance was fine for one kind of work at a time in the test’s one-minute full-load runs. But the coding agents work mostly by resending the conversation, and 96% of what the agents provided the model was stale text, according to the consultancy’s logs. It takes about 1,000 old tokens for every new token written; the re-reads are cheap, but so numerous that the box was kept busy re-reading, leaving little of its time for writing new tokens.

Getting the model to run stably took five tries at 10 to 15 minutes of loading for each try. The box bills whether it’s busy or not, which is suboptimal. By our arithmetic, a standard-length month at the on-demand rate, $18.37 an hour, comes out to about $13,200. This is over twice the consultancy’s September Claude bill. Additionally, one box can only get through about 20 billion tokens a day, by the consultancy’s math, most of it re-reading, against the 51 billion the consultancy’s agents used on its busiest day.

The testing was aimed at anyone who has heard that DeepSeek is “80x cheaper” than Claude. One server running from Sept. 1–27 had 2.03 million model calls, 388.5 billion tokens read, 374.2 billion of them cached, and 393 million written, with 5,610 merged changes. The consultancy’s September Claude Code subscriptions came to about $5,500. The same 27 days of tokens on DeepSeek’s API would be between $3,500 and $7,000, depending on peak pricing, with our estimated average around $4,200 if usage is spread evenly across the week.

Set against Claude Opus 5.5’s list prices, the same tokens would come to about $140,000 by our math, over 25 times the cost of the subscription. That flat-rate discount is where the 80x went. The consultancy also priced each merged code change: about $1 on Claude, and about $0.63 on DeepSeek’s API if DeepSeek did the same work with the same tokens. Its $1.15–$4.90 estimate for DeepSeek is based on assumptions that the model would need more tokens, succeed less often, and need Claude to check its work.

DeepSeek never got to write actual code in the test. The consultancy’s reviewers kept finding ways agent code could escape the sandbox, for example via a settings file in a shared temp folder that could allow agent code to be run as admin. This meant the code-writing agents had to stay offline. Instead, DeepSeek ran only as 48 to 64 read-only reviewer agents, reading 2,377 folders and filing 32 bug reports. The box, rented at a $9.19-an-hour spot rate, was taken back by the provider within minutes of the last test ending.

Based on the V4 generation, where Pro outscored Flash, better performance from the model family can be expected with DeepSeek V4.1-Pro, which currently does not have a firm release date. This may change the math in the future, but for now there are better ways to spend on tokens than renting GPUs to run an open model.

Former EVGA product manager Brendon Ray Hedrick has posted a personal account of his time at the company in which he details the challenges that EVGA encountered near the end of its partnership with Nvidia. When he left the company in 2019, Hedrick predicted that the business relationship between the two companies would eventually implode, which proved to be largely accurate when EVGA exited the GPU market in 2022.

As he tells it, Hedrick's concerns about the relationship between the two companies began when it first released the Founders Edition GPUs in 2016. While EVGA had sold Nvidia reference designs with its own brand on the box before, its primary (and only) GPU supplier was now competing directly against it by selling graphics cards directly to customers, bypassing board partners entirely.

However, the biggest challenge that EVGA faced arose, according to Hedrick, was when Nvidia began requiring its partners to sell a model that would hit the announced MSRP, even if it sold at a loss. Companies that did not comply would get reduced chip allocations, so partners needed to produce a loss leader product to ensure that they would get all of the chips they would need to satisfy demand.

“The models on which we did not lose money had better circuit boards and cooling of our own, but they also carried a substantial premium,” Hedrick writes. “To a customer comparing them with the advertised starting price, it could look as though EVGA was charging an enormous amount just for those additions.”

In Hedrick's view, as Nvidia Founders Edition cards got better with each generation, more expensive AIB offerings started to make less sense for most buyers. This led to loss-leading models constantly being sold out, while customers who chose more premium models started to hold on to their GPUs for an extra generation or more. “For a manufacturer like EVGA, those decisions carried very different consequences. We still had cards to sell and a business to sustain; enough customers sitting out a generation could be financially devastating,” Hedrick wrote.

In reference to Nvidia's introduction of real-time ray tracing tech on its RTX 20-series cards in 2018, Hedrick recounts that “Nvidia could afford a long technological bet. My concern was whether a company as lean as EVGA could comfortably absorb the difficult part of it,” in reference to convincing consumers that the upgrade to the new tech was worth it at a time when only a tiny handful of games featured RT.

When Hedrick left the company, he says he believed that EVGA and Nvidia had about four or five years left before the situation led to a confrontation. This prediction came true a year earlier than Hedrick projected. In 2022, EVGA announced that it would no longer make partner cards with the advent of the RTX 40-series and that it would exit the GPU market once its stock of RTX 30-series GPUs had run out.

At that time, it was reported that Nvidia GPUs made up 78% of EVGA’s revenue while contributing only a tiny percentage of the company’s overall profit. Other reports also said that while lower-tier products like the RTX 3060 remained profitable, EVGA lost hundreds of dollars for every RTX 3080 and higher GPU model that it sold.

While it’s easy to blame Nvidia's policies for EVGA’s exit from the GPU market, other analyses partially blamed the company for practices like contracting manufacturing to third parties and providing overly generous customer service for its failures. Its focus on North America and Europe also led to the company shipping fewer units compared to its competitors, meaning its fixed costs were further cutting into its already narrow margins. Although EVGA’s customer-centric approach made it one of the most beloved brands in the GPU space, its strategies ultimately left it vulnerable, and we all know how the story ended.

Edit 10/1/2026 2:30am PT: Zotac has made a post saying that upon further investigation, it's 'possible' that the customer was given a fake invoice by a retailer. We reached out to the company for further clarity. A representative said the situation 'appears' to be the result of a fake invoice, but since the purchase date could not be determined, the firm fell back to using the import date as justification for the rejection. It appears that the import date restriction is still in force for any other warranty claims, but we await further clarification from Zotac. Notably, customers have no means to determine the date a retailer imported a product, which could expose them to potential RMA rejections.

Original report:

A Zotac RTX 3060 owner in India has been denied warranty support, even though their card would still seem to be covered. According to Reddit user u/AbhishekG9, they purchased a Zotac GeForce RTX 3060 Twin Edge from KVR Gaming System in Nehru Place, Delhi, on June 27, 2025. Zotac offers three years of standard warranty in India for RTX 30-series and later cards. That can be extended by two years in exchange for registering the product. The customer received an invoice and registered the graphics card with Zotac, for which an automatically generated registration confirmation was received on July 2, 2025.

However, when the customer reached out to Zotac for warranty support for an unspecified reason, the company reportedly told them that the graphics card was already out of warranty. According to an email from Zotac, the card's serial number showed an import date of April 2023. The company explained that warranty coverage can be determined using the original purchase date or the distributor's import date, and that product registration by itself does not establish warranty coverage.

At least in this instance, Zotac asserts that if one of its products is sold more than two years after it was imported, the company cannot provide extended warranty support. Since the graphics card was purchased by the customer in June 2025, the company advised them to approach the original seller for further assistance.

The customer argues that the distributor's original import date is not something an ordinary buyer would necessarily know when making a purchase. They also pointed out that they registered the product within days of purchase and received confirmation from Zotac.

Other users on the Reddit thread suggest that Zotac's policy isn't necessarily unreasonable. By tying the start of the warranty period to the date of import, plus an additional buffer period to allow the product to be sold, the policy would seem to prevent retailers from arbitrarily changing the date of sale in their records to make a product that would otherwise be out of warranty appear to be covered. If this particular card sat in retail inventory for an unusually long time (two years, in this instance), it's possible that initial buffer period was exhausted and that the clock began running down on the actual legal warranty period, regardless of the buyer's date of purchase.

But this could all be explained more clearly. If we take a look at the warranty terms and conditions on Zotac India’s website, it indeed mentions that the duration of warranty starts from the product's original date of purchase or the distributor import/invoice date. However, the policy does not explicitly specify a period in which the purchase date is used before the import date can become relevant, and that opaque reasoning appears to be the issue here.

The RTX 3060 owner told Tom’s Hardware that they plan to visit the shop where the graphics card was purchased and ask it to arrange a replacement. They also plan to record the visit as proof and, if the issue remains unresolved, file a complaint with India’s National Consumer Helpline.

This is not the first time Zotac has faced criticism over hair-splitting a warranty claim. Back in December 2025, an RTX 5070 Ti owner’s RMA was denied after Zotac said it had found an “irreversible” crack in the PCB near the PCIe connector. The company attributed the damage to external mechanical stress and suggested that the customer file a claim with the shipping carrier. Zotac later offered to dispose of the graphics card at its facility if the customer did not want it returned.

Thermal Grizzly and Noctua have teamed up to release a new version of the WireView Pro II GPU monitoring device. By combining Thermal Grizzly’s power monitoring hardware with Noctua’s expertise in low-noise cooling, the WireView Pro II Noctua Edition aims to offer quieter operation by reducing the noise generated by the device’s cooling fan.

According to Roman Hartung, CEO of Thermal Grizzly, the GPU monitoring device has become a popular choice and has helped many users detect potentially dangerous connector issues with the infamous 12V-2x6 connector before they could cause damage. The WireView Pro II measures current independently on each 12V conductor rather than simply monitoring total power consumption. This allows it to identify unusual current distribution and potential contact issues that could contribute to connector damage. The device can also provide visual and audible warnings when configured limits are exceeded, with an optional automatic shutdown function.

"One of the most common points of feedback, however, was that the fan could still be noticeable in very quiet systems, so working with Noctua on a significantly quieter cooling solution was the logical next step - and, for us, really completes the product," added Hartung. For the Noctua Edition, the standard cooling solution has been replaced with a customized design featuring a Noctua NF-A4x10 fan, an optimized fan grille, and an enlarged CNC-machined aluminum housing. The fan uses semi-passive operation, remaining off for longer periods and only spinning when additional cooling is required.

In a worst-case scenario with the case fans turned off and temperatures above 40°C, it could handle up to a 300W GPU load without turning its fan on. When it does need active cooling, its fan runs under 2,000 RPM compared to 5,000 RPM on the standard mode, which cuts down noise from 39.4dB(A) to just 21.5dB(A) at a 10cm distance. This should make it essentially inaudible alongside the other fans in a very quiet PC.

The WireView Pro II Noctua Edition is available in Normal and Reversed variants to accommodate different 12V-2x6 connector and cable-routing configurations, along with an extended two-year warranty covering the GPU connector. While the press note suggests a retail price of $189.90, it is currently selling at $222.18 on Thermal Grizzly’s official online store.

Nvidia officially rolled out DLSS 5 earlier this month, bringing its new Neural Rendering technology to supported games for RTX 50-series GPU owners. While early testing has shown improvements in image quality and rendering, the technology is very resource-intensive, resulting in significant drops in frame rate. That, however, has not stopped modders from experimenting with DLSS 5 and attempting to bring the technology to AMD Radeon GPUs.

A GitHub project called DLSS-NR-on-AMD, designed to run DLSS 5 Neural Rendering on AMD's Radeon RX 9000 and RX 7000 series GPUs, is already seeing a rapid improvement in performance. It uses a ground-up, full reimplementation of the neural network runtime for AMD GPU architectures. As per the developer, the project currently works with DirectX 12 games that use FSR, with Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA V Enhanced among the tested titles.

Testing done by YouTube channel Ancient Gameplays shows Cyberpunk 2077 running at over 80 FPS on a Radeon RX 9070 XT without DLSS 5 Neural Rendering. Enabling the unofficial implementation, however, caused performance to drop around 11-12 FPS. Not only is that unplayable, but it also highlights just how much optimization was still needed to make the technology practical on AMD hardware.

Development has been rather quick, as an Alpha 0.3.3 version was released with a claimed 23% performance improvement, followed shortly by Alpha 0.4.0, which reportedly added another 42% improvement over version 0.3.3. The changes essentially amount to roughly a 74% performance improvement in just 24 hours. The project has also become easier to install thanks to the AMDNR launcher that can automate much of the setup process, meaning that users no longer need to manually copy and replace DLL files for each game. The launcher also supports different runtimes and provides additional options through the OptiScaler interface.

Ancient Gameplays tested the latest Alpha 0.4.0 build in Cyberpunk 2077 at 3440 x 1440 resolution and found the Radeon GPU reaching around 50 FPS. That is a substantial improvement over the roughly 30 FPS achieved with the earlier build, although it remains well below the performance of the game without Neural Rendering enabled.

There is still a long way to go before DLSS 5 on AMD hardware can be considered a practical alternative to native implementation. The project remains in alpha, which means performance and compatibility can vary considerably depending on the game and GPU. That said, the developer has informed Ancient Gameplays that they are working on another major update, which should bring a substantial performance boost on Radeon GPUs.

PlusAI, an autonomous trucking startup, is working with Nvidia to develop its systems and has several trucks and trailers marked with the logos of both companies. This likely caught the attention of thieves who were looking to score big on AI GPUs, with Wired reporting that two of the startup’s trailers got stolen and were found at another location. However, the joke’s on the criminals, as they discovered that the two stolen units contained 20,000 pounds of sand each.

The AI data center construction boom has made PC components like RAM and GPUs insanely expensive, which has led to a rise in petty theft involving these components. Enterprises and startups are being targeted, too, especially as they build data centers and local AI servers with millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and hardware. We’ve already seen cargo heists of copper cable and other hardware worth $1.3 million, while other criminals have become more brazen, pushing or spinning security escorts off the road so they can get away with a truck’s worth of AI GPUs.

While PlusAI is partnered with Nvidia, it also uses simulated cargo loads for real-world tests, allowing the company to model how a fully loaded semi-trailer would react to various road conditions. The startup’s truck cabs, which likely had advanced AI hardware installed, were parked securely inside its warehouse, while the trailers were apparently left outside and secured with hand locks. “PlusAI uses simulated loads in its trailers to assist with research and development testing,” company spokesperson Lauren Kwan told Wired, adding that they were recovered with “40,000 pounds of sand intact.”

Interestingly, the discovery of the theft was accidentally made by one of the startup’s top executives, who received a message from an acquaintance saying that they saw the trailers, which they described as “trucks,” near their workplace. This likely got the executive concerned, as that location was half a mile away from PlusAI’s warehouse, which led to the cops getting called. As for the prospective criminals, they probably left the crime scene disappointed — they thought they were getting a huge payday from two truckloads’ worth of smart silicon, but they ended up with 20 tons of dumb sand instead.

Nvidia has updated its RTX Mega Geometry SDK to 2.0, adding streaming support for “continuous level-of-detail clusters” to handle high-density meshes, according to the developer blog post. Nvidia says it works even for scenes too big for the VRAM budget. The technology is in addition to its RTX Kit, arriving alongside RTX Kit 2026.3. The announcement comes close to the release of Gears of War: E-Day, which makes use of RTX Mega Geometry technology. Nvidia has not explicitly said what version of Mega Geometry the game uses.

Mega Geometry “organizes detailed meshes into clusters so ray-traced scenes can adapt geometric detail efficiently,” according to Nvidia. The SDK appeared at version 0.9.0 beta in 2025 and found its way into Alan Wake 2’s title update 1.2.8 early that same year. Our test on an RTX 4090 found about 1GB of VRAM saved with a performance boost of 13%, at native 4K and with DLSS Quality. On an 8GB graphics card, that 1GB is an eighth of the memory.

The SDK is at version 2.0.0 on GitHub as of this week. The technology makes dense scenes less expensive to ray trace, with 2.0 specifically targeting geometry that doesn’t fit in VRAM. This means that “a scene’s source geometry no longer has to fit in VRAM [with detail] bounded by a memory budget rather than by mesh count,” according to Nvidia’s changelog.

When a scene goes over budget, it settles at lower detail instead of constantly swapping geometry in and out of VRAM. By default, this is based on 2GB of VRAM for streamed geometry, another 2GB for ray-tracing acceleration structures, and 4GB of material textures, but these are adjustable. The existing tessellation path remains.

In the case of Nvidia’s sample Zorah, there are 1.6 billion unique triangles in a 70GB download, with a first load that can require up to 64GB of RAM at peak. Zorah uses 31GB of mesh data, but the courtyard sample view only has 1.5GB of mesh data in VRAM, using an RTX 5090 at 4K with DLSS Quality.

The sample requires an RTX GPU with 10GB of VRAM or more, a Game Ready driver 570 or later, Microsoft’s DXR 1.1 or later, and Windows 10 at a minimum. For now, this looks more like a tool for developers than players. It’s an SDK with a reference sample, and currently no game has been confirmed to use it.

The rest of RTX Kit 2026.3 includes RTX Character Rendering 1.4, RTX Dynamic Illumination 3.1, RTX Neural Texture Compression (NTC) 0.10 beta, RTX Neural Shading 1.4, and RTX Texture Filtering 1.3. NTC has been at v0.10.0 beta on GitHub since Aug. 4, with the DX12 LinAlg path only for testing purposes. The DX12 LinAlg path requires preview driver 620.12, the preview Agility SDK, and Windows Developer Mode. That leaves Vulkan as the only way for released games to use NTC with Tensor Core acceleration today.

An existing problem, Nvidia said in August, is that under ray tracing, Nanite elements “switch to a single, static low-detail mesh” because it’s “prohibitively expensive” to build acceleration structures for them with “existing DXR 1.2 and Vulkan APIs.” It has taken six years of research and development to pioneer the new technology, with the innovations debuting with Gears of War: E-Day on Oct. 6. These will later be part of Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing 2.0 standard, according to Nvidia.

On Sept. 22, in a Game Ready driver post, Nvidia stated that Mega Geometry enables “accurate ray tracing of Nanite geometry for the very first time.” Nvidia’s Game Ready driver 617.14 for the game is already out. Early access on Oct. 1 is the first chance for players to see Nvidia’s Nanite ray tracing technology in action.

When you buy a product, there is a reasonable expectation of warranty service. When you spend multiple thousands of dollars on a computer graphics card (a product category that has only recently entered the multi-thousand-dollar range), there is a reasonable expectation of exceptional service. What if, instead, you got absolutely no service? According to Redditor /u/Melodic_Initial_1767, that's what he got when he tried to RMA his burned GeForce RTX 5090.

Like so many others, "Melodic" found his graphics card non-functional after melting the 12V-2x6 connectors on both ends of the modular cable that came with his 1600-watt ASRock power supply (the PG-1600G, which we reviewed last year). This happened despite the fact that he says he was using the stock BIOS, no overclocking, and, in fact, a manually reduced power limit. Moreover, the card was supposedly sitting idle when it died, although that doesn't really mean anything. He opened a ticket with PNY and says he was denied the next day with this response:

Well, he wasn't using the included cable or an approved one, but he was using the native cable from his power supply; surely that should be good enough, right? After all, the warranty terms actually don't appear to say a single thing about 12VHPWR or 12V-2x6 cables. According to the Redditor, the only thing the warranty says about power is that the card has to be "installed in accordance with the installation guide provided herewith." Guess what the installation guide says?

If you guessed "locate an unused power connector within your system and plug it into the corresponding connector on your graphics card," congratulations, you will also be denied warranty service from PNY, because apparently you have to intuit which cables are approved by PNY, since, as far as we can see, there's no list of approved cables anywhere on PNY's website, nor in the product documentation for its graphics cards. Besides, the card didn't come with a 16-pin cable, so it's not like he could have used PNY's own cable, and the idea that the firm would prefer him to use an "octopus" adapter over a native cable is shaky at best.

I personally have never had the pleasure of dealing with PNY support, but multiple other Redditors in the thread, which is nearing 1,200 replies at this point, have mentioned a history of difficulty getting support from PNY. When asking the company which clause of their warranty policy they are using to deny his warranty request, /u/Melodic_Initial_1767 was apparently told by a "Senior Technician" that the decision is final and that his ticket had been closed.

A notable point brought up by /u/dusto_man in the thread is that the ASRock power supply used by "Melodic" advertises a "TempGuard" feature that supposedly monitors the temperature at the 12V-2x6 connector on the PSU side for safety, but clearly that either wasn't configured or also failed. ASRock offers a ten-year warranty on that unit; /u/dusto_man mentioned this in a thread where users were advising the original poster to contact ASRock and let that firm go after PNY to avoid covering the failed GPU, which is worth multiple thousands of dollars now.

Indeed, that could be why PNY is attempting to shut down the RMA attempt. The firm may not have any GeForce RTX 5090 cards to send him, and even if it does, the cheapest GeForce RTX 5090 card available to buy new on the market today is $4400 USD, and PNY would likely prefer to sell it at that price instead. While the board vendor is most likely only on the hook (legally) for /u/Melodic_Initial_1767's original purchase price, that could still easily be $2,000 or more. We have now seen these same RMA denial patterns with storage and memory devices from multiple vendors during the shortage, so it wouldn't be an exception. We'll have to wait and see if PNY will stand on unwritten technicalities rather than take a hit to its bottom line.

There is no doubt the GeForce RTX 5090 is one of the best graphics cards and has the full potential to leverage DLSS 5. However, if you plan to hop on the DLSS 5 bandwagon, you may want to keep an eye on your graphics card's temperatures and power consumption. According to tests by Korean outlet QuasarZone, the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition peaked at nearly 650W in power draw, with the highest recorded temperature on the 16-pin (12VHPWR) power connector exceeding 90 degrees Celsius. Notably, that is higher than the standard temperatures measured for the GPU die.

While less frequent, user reports of the 16-pin power connector melting are still popping up if you look around the Internet, particularly on Reddit. Even a couple of media outlets have also encountered power connector meltdowns during their use. So, it is not an issue that affects only new users; 16-pin power connector failures extend to seasoned industry veterans, too. There is no prejudice toward Nvidia's Blackwell-powered graphics cards, either. Similar meltdowns have appeared on AMD Radeon graphics cards. Running DLSS 5 may just be adding fuel to the fire, figuratively.

QuasarZone ran Cyberpunk 2077 in a controlled environment at 27.5 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes. The publication used a 4K (3840x2160) resolution with DLSS Quality and Ultra image settings and monitored the temperature of the 16-pin power connector. The media outlet tested the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition, Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090, and GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition.

Nvidia DLSS 5 Impact On 16-pin Power Connector Temperatures

In the first round of testing using a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition with DLSS 5 disabled, QuasarZone measured 77.1 degrees Celsius on the latch side of the 16-pin power connector and 80.9 degrees Celsius on the opposite side. With DLSS 5 enabled, the temperatures quickly jumped to 83.4 and 91.7 degrees Celsius, respectively.

Before DLSS 5, the average core and peak temperatures for the GeForce RTX 5090 were 79.4 and 82.3 degrees Celsius, respectively. Afterward, they increased to 83 and 86.3 degrees Celsius. As a result, the 16-pin power connector was the hottest spot on the GeForce RTX 5090.

In contrast, the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition ran at significantly lower, more manageable temperatures. Before activating DLSS 5, the temperature on the latch side and opposite the 16-pin power connector registered 45.8 and 47.6 degrees Celsius, respectively. With DLSS 5, the temperatures rose to 52.2 degrees Celsius on the latch side and 48.6 degrees Celsius on the opposite side. The results were not a surprise, since the GeForce RTX 5080 consumes less power than the GeForce RTX 5090.

Nvidia DLSS 5 Impact On Graphics Card Power Consumption

Using HWiNFO to measure average power consumption, the GeForce RTX 5090 showed a 13% increase in power draw with DLSS5 enabled. By contrast, the GeForce RTX 5080 showed a 17% increase in average power consumption under the same conditions. Despite these notable increases, both cards seemingly stayed within their official TDP specifications, with the RTX 5090 rated at 575W and the RTX 5080 at 360W.

HWiNFO uses a software-level API to poll power metrics from the graphics card's telemetry sensors. While it is sufficient for everyday monitoring, nothing is more accurate than measuring power directly from the circuit board. The Nvidia Power Capture Analysis Tool (PCAT) is perfect for that.

QuasarZone found that the GeForce RTX 5090's average and peak power draw increased by 13%, effectively exceeding the graphics card's power limit. The average power consumption readings differed by 3% between HWiNFO and PCAT.

Focusing primarily on the 16-pin power connector, QuasarZone's PCAT measurements showed a 582.7W power draw without DLSS 5 and 646.7W with it on, representing an 11% increase.

While 658W sounds scary, it does not compare to what we have seen on custom GeForce RTX 5090 models. On the GeForce RTX 5090 32G Lightning Z with DLSS 5, we observed the graphics card's power consumption spike to 592W at 1080p, 695W at 1440p, and 848W at 4K.

Using the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 as a test subject, QuasarZone recorded the current flowing through each of the six power pins from the 16-pin power connector. Before enabling DLSS 5, the power readings ranged from 6.94A to 7.47A. When activated, the power readings spiked to between 7.83A and 8.51A. While the values remained within PCI-SIG’s requirement of 9.2A per pin, headroom is extremely thin, with just 0.69A between the highest recorded current and the official threshold.

In another simulation, the Korean media outlet explored the consequences of a loose pin or improper connection in the 16-pin power connector. This is the most common scenario that leads to 16-pin power connector meltdowns, due to unbalanced power loading across the connector. With one nonfunctional power pin, the electrical load is redistributed to the remaining pins.

With DLSS 5 off, the highest current registered on a single pin reached 8.9A. This value remains uncomfortably close to PCI-SIG's standard. However, turning on DLSS 5 pushed the power pins to 10.1A, 10% above the specification. The simple test highlights just how easily and quickly things can go wrong.

QuasarZone's alarming test results may look like fuel for fearmongering. However, the publication's tests align closely with our findings that DLSS 5 substantially increases power consumption. At least one user has allegedly reported a 16-pin power connector meltdown while experimenting with DLSS 5.

A 3D artist looking to purchase an RTX 5090 for their work claimed that they scored an unopened Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 White OC from the secondhand market. According to Wccftech, the artist purchased the GPU expecting that it was signed by an Asus executive in celebration of the company’s 30th anniversary. But when they opened the package, they found the Nvidia chief’s signature on it instead.

Jensen Huang autographed the GPU and showed it off on camera last year, after which it was supposed to be given away by one lucky gamer. The artist did not mention how much they bought the “used” GPU for, but brand-new models of the RTX 5090 now hit $5,000 and can go up even higher, depending on the model. They also said that after opening the box, they did not use or test it, opting to sell it instead because of the immense value that such a limited-edition graphics card held for the right buyer.

This specific GPU is now in the hands of the Bonhams auction house, with bidding set for Oct. 4 to 14, 2026. It’s estimated that the graphics card will fetch somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000, especially as it bears the signature of Nvidia’s founder. However, it should be noted that an Asus ROG Matrix RTX 4090 sold for $16,000 back in 2023, while an Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 Dhabab OC Edition was auctioned off last year for $24,200. Both GPUs were also autographed by Jensen, so there’s a good chance that this graphics card could fetch a much higher price.

Another Jensen Huang-related object was put on the auction block earlier this year and hit a record price. The leather Tom Ford jacket that the CEO wore at the Hon Hai (Foxconn) Tech Day in Taipei way back in October 2023 went up on Sotheby’s, where it was estimated that it would fetch somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000. However, the final price ended up at $960,000 — more than a hundred times higher than the jacket’s $9,000 price tag from the manufacturer.

Even though Jensen Huang isn’t a celebrity in the traditional sense, his approachable public persona and success story have made him quite popular among his fans. This “Jensanity” is prevalent in Taiwan, where he was originally from, and many see him as the bearer of Taiwanese pride and treat him like a pop star. It seems that this translates to his rich fans, too, with a few who are willing to spend thousands of dollars just to get their hands on autographed “artifacts” from the billionaire.

External GPUs (eGPU) have been tried time and again, and while they have found their niche among laptop users, they're not commonplace. Now that the AI craze is in full swing, more people are looking into owning a graphics card of some sort for the single purpose of running LLMs locally. The WiCi One is designed with that specific scenario in mind, but adds wireless connectivity, multi-device support, and onboard storage.

That list of words usually doesn't belong in the same sentence as GPUs, so it merits close inspection. First and foremost, the WiCi One leverages the WiFi 7 protocol to transmit data to and from the card. The firm says that client machines keep a GPU driver that makes the operating system think it's a graphics card just like any other, while in reality they'll be talking to the WiCi One over the network.

However, as WiCi explains in great detail, just blindly doing that would make for a terrible eGPU, as the standard communication between host and card is extremely chatty. That's not a problem with the sub-microsecond latency of PCIe 5.0, but would quickly turn even basic status querying operations into multi-second affairs. Large computations with lots of data shuffled back and forth could hypothetically take hours.

The company claims its driver software performs a great deal of data caching, deduplication, and compression, and is also very judicious about what type of hardware requests can be handled locally versus those that really do need to go over the airwaves.

This mode of operation and its corresponding separation of concerns bring several advantages: theoretically, the one GPU could be used on multiple machines. There are Python libraries for passing the WiCi One as any other GPU to LLMs, and also a standard HTTP API for network access, once again lending credence to the fact that multiple clients could use the WiCi One without any special configuration.

Running LLMs means shuffling a substantial amount of data back-and-forth, and contemporary models with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture can run locally using an SSD as a fallback. WiCi took a clever approach and incorporated a 4 TB PCIe 5.0 SSD directly into the enclosure, in a bid to store model weights to both enable larger models and indirectly save on cross-network transfers.

WiCi also mentions that the card can also run games without modification, but doesn't elaborate on what kind of performance is expected. The documentation only ever mentions Vulkan and Direct3D, and hedges the fact that "[not] every API must be complete on day one." WiFi makes for a poor technology to underpin a real-time endeavor like pushing millions of polygons and textures in, and the resulting images out, in just 16.67ms for 60 FPS, so we'll venture that gamers will be best served with conventional eGPUs.

The base spec comes with an RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB graphics card, and is slated for a 2026 Q4 preview, with no release date set in stone. WiCi plans to offer a variant with an RTX 5090 and its 32 GB of VRAM, albeit there's no word on when that will arrive, much less at which price — especially considering those cards alone are currently going for well over 7 grand, and have been spotted selling for far more.

The asking price for all this is $1,999 for early signups, and $2,599 otherwise, for the base spec. Those figures might sound steep, but they're actually fairly reasonable if the WiCi packaging and software stack deliver. A quick skim of Newegg puts an RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB graphics card at $800 or more, while an NVMe 4 TB PCIe 5.0 SSD is a little pricier at $850. Once you factor in a hypothetical $100 for a power supply and another $100 for the case, Wi-Fi card, and assorted bits and bobs, you're at $1,850 already.

Despite strong launch sales, the Lisuan Tech LX 7G100 was clearly more of a domestic win for China than a contender against the best graphics cards on the market. Recent benchmark results published by German outlet PC Games Hardware (PCGH) show that the Chinese-made LX 7G100 still has a long way to go, offering only comparable performance to the nine-year-old Radeon RX 580 — but trailing by as much as 35% behind the seven-year-old GeForce RTX 2060.

Originally touted as a competitor to the GeForce RTX 4060, the LX 7G100 hit the market with high expectations. Initial benchmarks, however, quickly dispelled much of the early hype. Now, four months after its launch and following several driver updates, we once again see the LX 7G100 in the spotlight, but despite ongoing driver refinements, the graphics card's performance looks like it has flatlined.

The LX 7G100’s current performance closely matches AMD’s Radeon RX 580 and delivers a modest 5% boost over the Polaris-based card. It also outpaces Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB by a notable 23%. In its current state, the LX 7G100 does not have what it takes to challenge more modern models in the upper echelon of the mid-range graphics card market.

The LX 7G100 lags by more than 2.2X behind current models, such as the GeForce RTX 4060 or GeForce RX 5050. When benchmarked against the latest GeForce RTX 5060, the LX 7G100 delivers only about a third of the performance. An obvious technological gap remains between Lisuan Tech and industry giants such as Nvidia, AMD, and even Intel, and it still has a lot of catching up to do.

Lisuan Tech LX 7G100 Benchmarks

In its defense, the LX 7G100 has already cleared one of the biggest hurdles that typically hinder Chinese chipmakers: driver support. Many graphics cards from emerging Chinese manufacturers have historically suffered from poor compatibility and software support. Lisuan Tech not only became the first Chinese chipmaker to obtain WHQL support for a graphics card, but the LX 7G100 launched with stable DirectX 12 gaming compatibility from the get-go. This alone has enabled the LX 7G100 to run a wide variety of modern games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and Battlefield 6, to name a few.

Lisuan Tech is clearly committing to improving its drivers. In the past four months alone, the Chinese chipmaker has rolled out three WHQL-certified driver updates. Drivers take time to mature, and given that the LX 7G100 has not even been on the market for a year, it is unreasonable to expect Lisuan Tech to match decades of expertise like Nvidia and AMD.

From a hardware standpoint, the LX 7G100, which leverages TSMC’s N6 FinFET process node, is not a bad graphics card. The silicon houses 6,144 shading units and clocks up to 2,000 MHz to deliver a peak FP32 performance of 24.5 TFLOPs. The LX 7G100's 12GB of GDDR6 memory runs across a 192-bit memory interface to provide a maximum bandwidth of up to 432 GB/s. On paper, these metrics place the LX 7G100 close to the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB or Radeon RX 6700 XT. Currently, the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB is twice as fast as the LX 7G100.

A 2X performance gap is certainly not something that's easy to close. Who knows just how much is left in the tank for the LX 7G100. Maybe Lisuan Tech has already pushed the hardware to its limits, or maybe some driver magic will put the LX 7G100 a few steps closer to the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB. Only time will tell, and it will be interesting to revisit the LX 7G100 in a few months' time.

Nvidia Founders Edition GPUs are often harder to come by compared to cards from AIB partners, and they’re typically sold on specific retail channels only. However, it seems that CyberPowerPC got its hands on these graphics cards, and you can now get them inside pre-built gaming PCs sold by the company on Walmart. These PCs are also on sale as part of the Nvidia GeForce Week from September 21 through 27 on the retail platform. Aside from coming with these coveted GPUs from Nvidia, these pre-built gaming PCs are also on a huge discount, giving gamers savings of $580 to over $1,300. Unfortunately, these units are only available in limited quantities, so we’re unsure how long stock will last.

• Get the CyberPowerPC RTX 5070 FE + Intel Core i7-14700KF pre-built gaming PC on Walmart.
• Get the CyberPowerPC RTX 5070 FE + AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D pre-built gaming PC on Walmart.
• Get the CyberPowerPC RTX 5080 FE + AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D pre-built gaming PC on Walmart.
• Get the CyberPowerPC RTX 5080 FE + Intel Core Ultra 9 285K pre-built gaming PC on Walmart.
• Get the CyberPowerPC RTX 5090 FE + AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D pre-built gaming PC on Walmart.

Nvidia has recently sold Founders Edition GPUs in a pop-up retail store at QuakeCon 2026 while also having them available at the PAX West gaming convention in Seattle, Washington, earlier this month. The company calls these retail pop-up stores “Verified Priority Access IRL,” meaning only real people can buy the cards, which are sold at MSRP. The VPA program started with the launch of the RTX 4090 FE, but the company brought it back with the arrival of the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 to help prevent scalping.

The aggressive discounts on these pre-builts suggest that CyberPowerPC acquired these Founders Edition GPUs at MSRP. The RTX 5070 FE PC with an Intel i7-14700KF, which had an SRP of $2,139.99, now only costs $1,549.00, offering savings of $590.99, while the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D version is priced at $1,599.00 — a $580.99 discount from its $2,179.99 regular price.

The RTX 5080 FE pre-builts offer bigger savings: the AMD Ryzen 7 version is now only $2,299.00, saving you $680.99 from its $2,979.99 SRP, while the Intel Core Ultra 9 option has its prices to $2,399.00 from $3,149.99 through its $750.99 discount. Finally, the RTX 5090 FE pre-built gaming PC has a regular price of $5,649.99 but is on sale at just $4,299.00, giving you $1,350.99 in savings.

These prices will let you get your hands on some of the best gaming GPUs on the market right now without breaking your wallet. According to the Tom’s Hardware GPU Price Tracker, the cheapest RTX 5090 is the Asus TUF Gaming RTX 5090, and it’s already priced higher on Amazon at $6,699.00, making this entire pre-built cheaper than that standalone GPU. While the RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 GPUs in the list are cheaper than these CyberPowerPC units, you’re still getting a complete system with a modern processor and a PSU, plus RAM and an SSD, which are some of the most expensive components you can find today. You also don’t have to worry about other specifications — even though the listing does not mention the brands and models of the other components included in the gaming PCs, they’re still decently specced with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD (2TB for the RTX 5090 version). You’ll have to act quickly, though, as they seem to be selling out fast.

AMD has started to add support for GDDR7 memory and several new graphics IP blocks to its open-source Linux kernel driver, which indicates that software enablement for the company's next-generation standalone GPUs is underway, reports Phoronix. While AMD does not identify the upcoming architecture, the changes are likely tied to its RDNA 5 project — but they don't necessarily herald an imminent launch.

AMD's existing Radeon RX 9000-series graphics processors based on the RDNA 4 architecture use GDDR6 memory, so the addition of GDDR7 identification to drivers is arguably the most explicit confirmation that AMD is setting the stage for its next-generation discrete Radeon graphics processors based on the RDNA 5 architecture.

AMD also submitted patches that enable IH 8.0, a new version of its Interrupt Handler IP block, as well as NBIF 7.10, the latest revision of the company's New Bus Interface. Several smaller patches make additional preparations for the new hardware. These changes follow earlier Linux driver work involving Display Core Next 6 (DCN6) as well as GFX 13.0.x, suggesting that AMD is gradually upstreaming support for multiple components of an upcoming GPU architecture. Yet, while enablement of IH8, NBIF 7.10, DCN6, and GFX 13.0.x clearly point to new graphics hardware, it does not necessarily point to new discrete GPUs, unlike the mention of GDDR7.

As revealed in August, 2025, Laks Pappu, Senior Fellow at AMD, is the lead architect for AMD's next generation datacenter GPU and discrete graphics platforms. Pappu was building next-generation "competitive 2.5D/3.5D chiplet-based and monolithic graphics SoCs on various packaging technologies," according to his LinkedIn profile before it was edited to remove those disclosures.

Essentially, Pappu's profile indicated that AMD's next-generation GPU architecture could support multiple physical implementations — including multi-chiplet and monolithic — depending on performance, cost, market requirements, and AMD's willingness to compete in certain market segments

AMD has already used a multi-chiplet design with its Navi 31 GPU, an implementation that kept graphics processing hardware on a large Graphics Compute Die (GCD), but disaggregated memory interfaces and caches into smaller Memory Cache Dies (MCDs). A more ambitious implementation could potentially distribute graphics processing resources between multiple dies, although Pappu's profile did not disclose how AMD intended to partition its future GPUs.

Such an approach would be considerably more complicated than separating memory and cache functionality. Multiple compute dies would require high-bandwidth, low-latency connections as well as mechanisms for synchronization and coherency, while software would ideally continue to see the set of chiplets as a single graphics processor.

Based on conventional GPU development cycles of roughly 2.5 to 3.5 years, RDNA 5 could already have been approaching tape-out or early post-tape-out stages when the information surfaced in August 2025, which means that the company is already likely to be testing the new GPUs internally.

Officially, AMD hasn't disclosed any details about its RDNA 5 architecture nor launch schedule, so take these developments with a grain of salt. For now, all we know for sure is that AMD is working on standalone RDNA 5-based GPUs, and they're likely to use GDDR7 in at least some configurations, assuming the AI-driven memory crunch doesn't choke supply of those chips even further for consumer applications.

The indomitable GeForce RTX 5090 is getting harder and harder to find at any price, let alone for anywhere near its $1999 MSRP. If you can find one in stock, it's likely from a third-party seller, and prices from those sources are often over $8000 right now. But it's GeForce Week at Walmart, and as part of that deals event, you can get MSI's Gaming Trio RTX 5090 for just $4299 direct from a reputable seller — a screaming bargain in today's market.

• MSI Gaming Trio RTX 5090 32GB OC for $4299 at Walmart

The RTX 5090 needs no introduction as the most powerful gaming graphics card on the market today. If you're trying to max out path-traced lighting effects with all of Nvidia's DLSS 4.5 technology enabled at 4K (or even beyond), the RTX 5090 is still the king of graphics performance today.

It's also an amazing card for fast local AI work like LLM inference and image generation, and that multi-purpose appeal is part of why prices have shot up of late. New GeForce cards are still nowhere in sight, so if you're looking for the best gaming upgrade possible, the RTX 5090 is still it.

In our 2026 GPU Hierarchy testing at 4K, the RTX 5090 comes out on top, no matter what you throw at it. Whether you're trying to push raster or RT performance to the max, this card can do it all, without question.

If you're contemplating an RTX 5090 upgrade, be sure that your power supply is up to the task and that you're using a quality 12V-2x6 cable with it to minimize the chances of a costly meltdown. Be sure to consider an upgrade to one of our best picks for a 4K gaming monitor, too, as this card really is wasted on any other resolution.

The current AI boom means graphics card prices only seem set to rise for the foreseeable future, so even at this elevated price versus its MSRP, this MSI RTX 5090 is a rare opportunity to get the very best gaming GPU at a relatively attainable price. If you've been waiting, now is the time to jump.

AX Gaming has revealed its latest seasonal anime-themed limited-edition graphics card, which, this time, is designed to please your nose as much as your eyes. The Inno3D subsidiary has released similarly styled GPUs before, but new for Autumn / Fall is the “innovative e-sports aromatherapy” component in its GeForce RTX 5070 12G Autumn Limited Edition (machine translation).

Smellivision is included as part of this limited edition. The graphics card maker says this product delivers a form of aromatherapy. You will be able to smell the “autumn-like” aroma even from a cold start, it says. There is no information about aroma oil refills. It would be good to see the fragrance module to see how this subsystem works.

The anime character you see in the main picture, and who stars on the metal backplate, is called ‘Snow Li.’ She sits with the GeForce RTX logo to one side, with an Autumn / Starry Moon motif beneath it. To the right is an ornate venting pattern for the third fan to push air through the cooling fins.

AX Gaming’s substantial triple-fan card features a white-purple gradient wrapping around. “The fan blades are printed with exclusive logos such as Osmanthus, AX, and Star and Moon, making it lively and exquisite,” the maker romanticizes. “The edges of the chassis are decorated with colorful maple leaves and tiny star patterns, like starlight falling on a maple forest on an autumn night.” We also note this isn’t just a vinyl wrap. AX Gaming highlights that the design mixes “UV printing and multi-surface engraving techniques.” Even the fan blades have some logos.

This seasonal graphics card release has ARGB maple leaf lighting, and its “flower-shaped ventilation holes are inlaid with LEDs and support synchronized lighting effects.” Also, perhaps difficult to believe, AX Gaming says that the light and shadows thrown by the powered-up graphics card “creating a full-on autumn night starry night atmosphere.”

Beyond the visuals and fragrance, this is an ordinary but decent-sounding RTX 5070. You’ll still get your 6,144 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR7, and agreeable AAA gaming performance with access to GeForce features. Some non-cosmetic design choices that are welcome include the dual-layer metal magnetic backplate, five 8mm ultra-thick composite heat pipes, and the hidden power cabling.

In its press release, AX Gaming says the "Autumn Stars and Moon, Maple Leaves in Full Bloom" themed card is a strictly limited (quantity/time) release. That’s bound to make it even more expensive than a regular RTX 5070, if you can order/reserve one.

The developers of the open-source PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 are celebrating finding a workaround for an Nvidia driver bug. The social media celebration stems from their testing showing that some PC configurations with Nvidia GPUs can enjoy up to 37% faster gaming performance. That’s more than a small wrinkle that’s been ironed out.

We don’t know the exact nature of the Nvidia driver bug here, but the RPCS3 devs say that it bottlenecks the performance of their PS3 emulator. The first example cited provides two PC configurations running Red Dead Redemption in a scene featuring a paddle steamer. This is a popular ‘benchmarking’ scene focused on the Blackwater docks in the game, featuring relatively consistent camera paths and water effects.

Those are very gratifying performance uplifts resulting from a driver bug workaround. Plenty of readers are probably more interested if the purported bug might also be bottlenecking native PC gaming performance. If it were, that would be a hugely significant find/workaround from the RPCS3 team, specifically ‘Yahfz.’ Please note that “AMD GPU drivers do not have this bug, thus seeing no change,” say the emulator developers.

Gran Turismo 5 ran 37% faster, used far less VRAM

Follow-up social media postings underline that RDR isn’t an outlier, and “most games are impacted” by the bottleneck in the Nvidia driver. Great frame rate improvements can also be seen when using lower-end GPUs, too. The open sourcerers tested Gran Turismo 5 and saw frame rates climb by an incredible 37%, while VRAM usage dropped from 7.1 to 4.8GB. Meanwhile, playing Saints Row IV on a more mainstream GTX 1060 saw a 20% improvement in performance.

Sadly, RPCS3 dev reach-outs to Nvidia are falling on deaf ears. Another follow-up tweet states that “We tried using the developer forums in the past to no avail and gave up.” It then asks @Nvidia to establish a direct communication channel to receive driver bug reports. Nvidia Software QA boss Manuel Guzman has now replied directly, so we will see what happens in due course.

Hardware leaker Kopite7Kimi, who has an exceptional track record, posted on X that Nvidia's RTX 60 series GPUs, based on the Rubin architecture, might not be released until at least 2028. The leaker previously believed that we might see a new generation of graphics cards in late 2027, but now says: "Unfortunately, GR20x is a product from 2028. That means they have postponed again." We reached out to Nvidia regarding the post, and a company spokesperson stated that they "don't comment on rumors or unannounced products."

While Nvidia issued its standard boilerplate response, Kopite7Kimi has a historically near-spotless record when it comes to speaking about Nvidia hardware leaks, and it seems that this time, consumers may have to wait a little longer. Both the Ada Lovelace and Blackwell architectures in RTX 40 and RTX 50 series GPUs share the same TSMC 4N process node, so if the leaker's words are to be believed, it will take Nvidia a total of six years to move its consumer GPUs to the more advanced TSMC 3N or 3NP node that its Rubin accelerators currently utilize.

Now, the potential reasons behind the delay could be twofold: The first is the numerous reports we've heard about a potential RTX 50 Super series Blackwell refresh being sidelined, despite reportedly being ready. The claimed reason behind the delay or potential cancellation of the rumored RTX 50 Super series is the use of denser 3GB GDDR7 VRAM chips, which just so happen to have appeared in Nvidia's recently released RTX Pro 5500 and share many similarities with the RTX 5090.

So, it's quite possible that the delays in delivering a GeForce product based on the Rubin architecture, which has already begun shipping as "the fastest ramp in company history," is down to careful allocation of resources on Nvidia's part, as the company expects to make $20 billion from Vera Rubin in Q3 2027.

Secondly, Nvidia can only acquire so many resources to supply its products, which demand vast amounts of memory, and has also locked in a certain amount of wafer supply from TSMC. So, it's highly probable that Nvidia is focusing on enterprise and workstation products ahead of a consumer launch, especially as component costs remain eye-wateringly high. Nvidia's highly profitable data center arm is currently experiencing soaring demand from the ongoing AI buildout, meaning there's less onus to deliver a potentially less profitable consumer GPU, while there's still cash to be made from hyperscalers.

It's not unusual to see enterprise products use more advanced nodes before arriving in consumer products, but this time around, at least according to Kopite7Kimi, the Blackwell product cycle is poised to be unusually long. This is particularly bad news for consumers, as the RTX 5090 is experiencing a pricing squeeze, which is seeing costs soaring all the way above $9,000 — if you're lucky enough to find one listed online.

For now, your best bet is to just hold on to the GPU you currently have until the storm blows over and a new generation of graphics cards is released, unless you're willing to pay the dizzyingly high costs that the market demands right now.

Nvidia’s Turing GPUs became available to enthusiasts for the first time on this day eight years ago. This wasn’t just another accelerated GPU generation, though, at least according to Nvidia. The GeForce 20 series pioneered a “20 years in the making” ability to deliver hybrid graphics enhanced by real-time ray tracing. Nvidia made this new technology available at the high-end first, via the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti (review links). The more mainstream RTX 2070 wouldn’t become available until October.

In a blog post a month ahead of the release day, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang didn't hold back in heralding the arrival of Turning for PC gaming graphics. “Turing opens up a new golden age of gaming, with realism only possible with ray tracing, which most people thought was still a decade away.” He went on to claim that “Once you see an RTX game, you can’t go back.”

Despite Huang’s boasts we can look back and confidently say that many gamers still don’t care about ray tracing. Nor do they wish to endure the performance impact even the latest generation mainstream graphics cards from Nvidia (and AMD, and Intel) still suffer from when this feature is turned on. Moreover, at the time of launch back in 2018, and for quite a few months onwards, there was little in the way of content that made the new RTX 20 series' distinguishing feature seem worthwhile. Early in-game showcases that garnered a lot of pixel peeping and chin rubbing included Battlefield V, Metro Exodus, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Our review of the RTX 2080 Founders Edition noted that this new second-fastest Turing architecture card managed to outpace the legendary GTX 1080 Ti. However, we grumbled about it being $100 more expensive than the former flagship. During this era, Nvidia Founders Editions were actually more expensive than the base models from AIBs. Thus the RTX 2080 FE had an MSRP of $799, but you might have been able to pick up an Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, or Zotac for $699.

Our review of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti flagship was more positive, despite the conclusion that the “$1200 price tag is out of reach for most gamers.” The 71% uplift in price wasn’t really worth it for the ~26% faster performance vs the GTX 1080 Ti. It was also about 20% faster in gaming than the pro Titan V, though.

Our review of the RTX 2080 Ti was 14 pages long, but here’s a direct link to some gaming benchmarks featuring the likes of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, The Witcher 3, and World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. During gaming, this new consumer flagship would typically consume about 280W.

Eight years later, we can say that realtime ray tracing has indeed proved popular. Even consoles and mobile games now use and boast of this visual tech, and probably couldn’t ignore it without getting sidelined. But adoption has been slow, and it has taken yet more layers of technology, such as DLSS for the green team, to make ray tracing at all accessible for budget / mainstream gamers, even in 2026.

Do you still rock a Turing GPU in 2026? If you do, or are just curious about how well an 8-year-old card would do in 2026, I'm sorry to say that Turing has slipped off the end of our famous graphics card hierarchy. However, the following generation RTX 3070 at $499 offered very similar performance to the prior-gen $1,199 flagship. Those were the days (except that the cryptomining craze happened).

A modder by the name of MAAN has reportedly gotten Nvidia DLSS 5 working in a browser window with an interactive demo, according to a report by VideoCardz. The developer said the technique also works on macOS. The demo is hosted on Cloudflare Workers with some default scenes, starting with "Cowboy Gramps," with a variety of adjustable settings and a comparison view.

DLSS 5 is Nvidia's neural rendering feature used to improve graphical quality using AI. Nvidia launched it earlier this month for NBA 2K27, the first game with official support for the technology. DLSS 5 is officially RTX 50-series only, aside from GeForce NOW. The DLSS 5 DLL file has since been pushed onto RTX 40- and RTX 30-series, and even AMD hardware. There is also a mod to unlock it for RTX 20-series hardware.

According to MAAN, the demo uses model weights extracted from a leaked DLSS 5 library file. They did not know whether this file differs from the official one. Normally, Nvidia offers DLSS through its NGX interface or the Streamline SDK on DirectX and Vulkan. The documentation does not list WebGL or WebGPU, the outlet noted. MAAN plans to publish the source code on GitHub this weekend.

In our quick test of the demo on an RTX 40-series desktop, the 3D viewer was smooth to rotate, but each DLSS 5 render took a second or two and was notably slow in live mode.

MAAN said that the demo is DLSS 5's neural network reimplemented using WebGPU compute shaders. The weights are around 147MB, with a JavaScript runtime of around 1MB compressed. WebGPU has no trouble running on macOS, so the only surprise here is the DLSS part. Normally this needs an RTX GPU and Nvidia's driver, but a WebGPU implementation would not inherently require Nvidia hardware.

The outlet suggested the approach could suit architecture, 3D model previews, and other work where real-time speed matters less. MAAN's X post said users "can try it with your own models" and the demo's page accepts common 3D formats by file or drag-and-drop. Due to the technology's current restrictions, a browser demo is a way for more people to see the effect on a model without owning the game or appropriate hardware. Nvidia has said official RTX 40-series support is coming.

The GeForce RTX 5090 is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the best graphics cards. However, you'd better pray the serial number on the inside of the metal bracket does not fade over time, since that could be a reason for Nvidia to reject warranty claims. At least one Redditor has shared a case of Nvidia reportedly denying a warranty claim because the bracket's serial number was unreadable.

The Redditor Willing-Avocado-4830, based in the UK, began experiencing black-screen crashes with a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card under heavy load. The user sent the card to Nvidia for a warranty claim. After 30 days of radio silence, the owner finally received an email stating that their RMA request was rejected with no apparent explanation for the denial.

Seeking clarification, the user reached out to Nvidia for further information. According to the Redditor's recount, Nvidia support purportedly rejected the RMA because the serial number on the graphics card's metal bracket had faded. Like many gamers, Willing-Avocado-4830 claims never to have modified or tampered with the graphics card after installation. The fading serial number does not appear to be an isolated incident. Several other owners have reported similar issues in the Reddit discussion.

The metal bracket on graphics cards is susceptible to dust buildup, oxidation, and corrosion over time. This can cause it to look dirty, stained, or sometimes slightly discolored compared to when it was brand new. These same phenomena could have affected the serial number's legibility, especially since it is printed with ink onto the bracket's surface rather than etched for better durability. For comparison, the last-generation GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition had its serial number laser-etched onto the metal bracket.

One Redditor said that someone in the Nvidia Discord channel recommended cleaning the area with isopropyl alcohol to restore the serial number's visibility. However, that may not work if the ink is no longer present, as previous reports suggest the hot air expelled by the Founders Edition cooler could be erasing the serial number.

Surprisingly, Nvidia rejected a warranty claim solely because of a faded serial number on the graphics card’s bracket. The same serial number is clearly printed on a sticker on Nvidia's modular PCIe connector, which the chipmaker's technicians can verify when disassembling the GeForce RTX 5090. Moreover, you can pull the serial number from the graphics card through the command prompt with Nvidia SMI (System Management Interface), assuming the card is still working, which, in this case, it is. Willing-Avocado-4830 still had the original packaging and the original invoice from Nvidia U.K., so it would be easy to cross-reference the serial numbers.

Redditor hawok reportedly sent their GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition for RMA two months ago and encountered a similar situation. The serial number on the metal bracket was only partially visible. However, customer support seemingly accepted the RMA after the user sent photographs of the packaging that corroborated the serial number. It is unclear what Nvidia's policy is, or whether the chipmaker handles each case differently. We have reached out to Nvidia for clarification.

Some Redditors have suggested taking a photograph that shows the graphics card's serial number next to the packaging's serial number. Others jokingly recommend putting a piece of tape over the serial number. It might not be a bad idea, but you would need heat-resistant tape, something like Kapton tape.

GeForce RTX 5090 stock has practically disappeared from the U.S. market, with very few units starting at $6,500, 3.25X over the Blackwell flagship's MSRP. You cannot blame GeForce RTX 5090 owners for worrying. They already have a lot on their plates, dealing with the 16-pin power connector melting woes, and now also have to worry about fading serial numbers.

It's back: one of the best deals on a brand-new, current-generation, mid-range graphics card that packs 12GB of VRAM. There is a little hoop to jump through via Newegg to receive the discount, but it's more than worth it to slash $70 off the card and bring the price back down to its all-time low. AMD's Gigabyte Gaming Radeon RX 9070 GRE GPU is available at Newegg for $499. All you need to do is click on the "Extra Discount Available" link and enter your email address to receive the promotional code. Once you do that, you bring the price of this graphics card all the way down from its $569.99 list price. It's a very grim time for shopping for PC component upgrades, so to see an actual deal on a GPU that takes it below its MSRP in today's inflated market is a rare sight indeed.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The RX 9070 GRE was initially made available to the Chinese GPU market and received a few changes from the original RX 9070 XT. The available VRAM was cut from 16GB to just 12GB of GDDR6, but it still sports bandwidth speeds of 18 Gbps on a 192-bit bus, producing 432 GB/s of memory bandwidth in gaming and applications. The Radeon RX 9070 GRE is still built on AMD’s RDNA 4 graphics architecture and uses the same Navi 48 GPU as the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. The RX 9070 GRE features a cut-down version of the Navi 48 chip with 48 compute units compared to the RX 9070's 56. Using just 220W total power draw, the RX 9070 GRE has an Identical power footprint to the standard Radeon RX 9070 GPU, making it quite power efficient and not needing a huge power supply to run.

We benchmarked the Radeon RX 9070 GRE in our extensive review, putting it through its paces in our suite of games. We found the card averages a cool 120 FPS at 1080p settings and 86.6 FPS at 1440p across our 11-game raster-only test suite. This is a good GPU choice for 1080p and 1440p gaming, with the RX 9070 GRE packing ample VRAM for high settings at 1080p, but pushing ultra settings at 1440p may use up the 12GB of VRAM. AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE sits just behind Nvidia's RTX 5070 in our results chart that you can view below.

If you're actively looking for a new GPU in the current PC component market, you're more than aware of the considerable price hikes across the GPU lineups from both AMD and Nvidia. To see a graphics card on sale for under its launch MSRP is a very rare sight, and I personally did not expect to see this kind of deal again outside of a large sale event like Prime Day or Black Friday. So if you're looking for a competent card for 1080p and 1440p gaming, then jump on the Gigabyte Gaming RX 9070 GRE for just $499.99.

Nvidia's fastest gaming graphics card, the RTX 5090, has been on a tear of price increases over the past several weeks. However, over the past week, the available inventory has dwindled. Now, you can only find the RTX 5090 from third-party sellers at online retailers like Newegg and Amazon, commanding anywhere from $6,500 to $9,500 (or even higher) for Team Green's best GPU.

At Newegg, the cheapest RTX 5090 is the MSI Ventus 3X that's available from Slava Computers (a relatively new seller with 239 ratings and a 2.8 out of 5 rating at the time of writing) for $6,449. On Amazon, you can get the Asus TUF Gaming OC for $6,395 from Joes Tech Shop, a seller with an 81% positive rating. However, among the most recent reviews are a string of one-star reviews about orders never being fulfilled. The cost goes much higher, as well. The first result for "RTX 5090" on Newegg, for example, surfaces the MSI Ventus 3X OC for $8,699.

In June, the median price for an RTX 5090 was $4,299. At the beginning of September, we logged the lowest online price at $5,199 in our GPU price tracker. Now, in less than two weeks, the available stock has completely disappeared online, and the options available from third-party sellers have ballooned in price once again.

Naturally, we don't recommend buying from one of these third-party sellers. The RTX 5090 is selling at a vastly inflated price, but more importantly, we've seen no shortage of scams around high-ticket items like the RTX 5090. In January, 42 Amazon customers were duped into a scam involving a $999 RTX 5090, instead receiving a fanny pack in place of the GPU. Earlier this month, an online seller scammed two buyers with the RTX 5090, selling phantom graphics cards with the core and memory removed on the secondhand market for prices near MSRP.

The one exception to RTX 5090 inventory is Micro Center, which still has cards available around the average selling price. At a local Micro Center we checked, the cheapest in-stock option was $4,299. Micro Center has exclusively sold graphics cards in-person for several years, insulating it from online buyouts like what appears to be going on right now.

As usual, the reason why there's so much demand for the RTX 5090 is fairly obvious: AI. The RTX 5090 holds the GB202 GPU and 32GB of GDDR7 memory. For context, Nvidia's RTX Pro 5000 48GB comes with the same GPU with a third fewer shader units enabled, and lower memory bandwidth compared to the RTX 5090, and sells for between $7,000 and $9,000. In that context, the RTX 5090 starts to look attractive for building an AI server, even at $5,000 (or more) apiece.

At the same time, the RTX 5090 remains the fastest gaming graphics card on the market according to the testing in our GPU benchmark hierarchy. That's even more true now with Nvidia's launch of DLSS 5 Neural Rendering, which the RTX 5090 can fully capitalize on (though, thankfully, we've found playable performance on lower-end cards in our extensive DLSS 5 testing).

We've reached out to Nvidia for comment on whether it has any plans to stabilize inventory. We'll update this story when we hear back.

The GeForce RTX 5090 is undeniably one of the best graphics cards money can buy. Banking on the fact that many already use it for AI, Nvidia has bolstered it with even more memory and launched it as the new RTX 5500 Pro Blackwell Workstation Edition. It offers comparable specifications to the GeForce RTX 5090 but distinguishes itself with 84GB of GDDR7 memory, 2.6X more than the Blackwell gaming flagship.

The RTX Pro 5500 features the GB202 silicon, the powerhouse die that powers other high-end mainstream and professional Blackwell graphics cards, including the GeForce RTX 5090, RTX Pro 6000, and RTX Pro 5000. In fact, the RTX Pro 5500 uses the same die as the GeForce RTX 5090, which means 170 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) are enabled out of a possible 192. As a result, the RTX Pro 5500 has 21,760 CUDA cores and offers performance comparable to the GeForce RTX 5090. The differentiator is the memory subsystem, where the RTX Pro 5500 excels.

Nvidia equipped the RTX Pro 5500 with 84GB of GDDR7 memory. This is the second time Nvidia has launched a graphics card with 84GB of memory, with the first being the China-exclusive RTX Pro 6000D. The RTX Pro 5500's memory capacity lets the Blackwell graphics card sit comfortably between the RTX Pro 5000 and the upgraded RTX Pro 6000, with 72GB and 96GB of GDDR7 memory, respectively.

Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 Workstation Edition Specifications

Nvidia achieved the 84GB memory capacity by outfitting the RTX Pro 5500 with 28 GDDR7 memory chips in a clamshell configuration. Each side of the PCB houses 14 24Gb (3GB) GDDR7 memory modules. They run at 25 Gb/s across a 448-bit memory interface, delivering up to 1,400 GB/s of bandwidth, which aligns with Nvidia’s official specification of 1,398 GB/s. In other words, the RTX Pro 5500 shares the same memory subsystem as the RTX Pro 6000D.

Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix only produce standard 28 Gb/s memory packages. Therefore, Nvidia downclocks the RTX Pro 5500's GDDR7 chips for its own reasons, whether to meet thermal and power targets or avoid cannibalizing higher-tier SKUs. From a memory-bandwidth perspective, the RTX Pro 5500 is not particularly impressive. Its bandwidth is only 4% ahead of the RTX Pro 5000, and it lags 22% behind both the flagship RTX Pro 6000 and the GeForce RTX 5090, which fully leverage 28 Gb/s GDDR7 memory chips.

To sum it all up, if RTX Pro 6000D and GeForce RTX 5090 had a child, it would be the RTX Pro 5500. Nvidia's main motivation was to launch the RTX Pro 5500 to fill the large performance and pricing gap between the RTX Pro 6000 and RTX Pro 5000. Also, the chipmaker makes substantially more profit by putting recycled GB202 into an RTX Pro 5500 than into a GeForce RTX 5090. By giving the former more memory with similar core specifications as the latter, Nvidia seemingly hopes to win more customers over to the RTX Pro 5500.

We reached out to both Nvidia and PNY for official pricing on the RTX Pro 5500, but neither company has responded. For reference, the flagship RTX Pro 6000 retails for $15,599, while an RTX Pro 5000 72GB starts at $9,209. Given the RTX Pro 5500's role as a bridge between the two models, it is reasonable to expect its launch price to fall somewhere within this range.

With the latest ROCm updates, AMD finally brought robust, official PyTorch and HIP SDK support to Windows for consumer GPUs, fully supporting the Radeon RX 7000 and the RX 9000 series. For native, supported frameworks, AMD on Windows is finally a viable reality, but what happens when you want to run a proprietary application, an older repository, or a specialized AI tool that absolutely refuses to support anything but NVIDIA's CUDA? That's where a new project, Speedstu's "CUDA-for-AMD-Windows," could save the day. It proves that running rigidly CUDA-exclusive workloads on AMD hardware in Windows is possible without virtualization or dual-booting.

To be clear, this project is not a brand-new runtime. Instead, it is a highly automated and reproducible PowerShell setup that bridges the gap between ZLUDA, the well-known, formerly AMD-funded translation layer, and AMD's native HIP/ROCm SDK for Windows. Through a series of clever scripts, the toolkit automatically detects the user's GPU architecture, grabs a specifically pinned version of ZLUDA (v6-preview.69), and, at least in theory, seamlessly maps it to the ROCm math libraries already present in Windows.

The result is that the developer successfully intercepted and mapped the CUDA driver API as well as the cuBLAS, cuSPARSE, and cuFFT libraries directly over to their AMD equivalents. As a proof-of-concept, the author even trained a 2.2-million-parameter PPO reinforcement-learning network end-to-end using unmodified CUDA libraries on an AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT, which happens to be the only officially supported GPU at this time.

Even with AMD's official ROCm support on Windows, the local developer community frequently runs into dependency hell when trying out experimental GitHub repos or specialized AI tools that hardcode CUDA as a requirement. For developers who want to experiment with these CUDA-only tools natively on their Windows daily driver machines without dealing with WSL2 passthrough issues or waiting for the original author to write a HIP port, this project offers a highly desirable translation pipeline. It acts as a sort of hacky adapter for software that stubbornly demands an NVIDIA card.

Benchmark testing included in the project's documentation offers some interesting findings. In a controlled A/B test running a 2.2M-parameter reinforcement learning workload on a Radeon RX 9060 XT, the "public upstream path," which relies purely on official ZLUDA releases and AMD's stock HIP SDK 6.4, achieved a median throughput of 13,278 steps per second (SPS). By contrast, an optional "recovered custom overlay" apparently built from salvaged legacy ZLUDA binaries ran slightly worse at 12,876 SPS, making it roughly 3% slower. While the clean official setup is faster, the author notes that "a later rewrite removed LibTorch/ZLUDA from PPO and achieved substantially higher throughput," indicating that there is still a performance hit for this stack of translators.

Now, before anyone declares the CUDA moat officially drained, it is crucial to set realistic expectations. First, this is a solo open-source project, not an enterprise-grade solution. The author is extremely transparent about its narrow scope, as crucial machine learning libraries like cuDNN, TensorRT, and NCCL do not resolve yet. This means compatibility is strictly workload-dependent; if your specific AI tool relies heavily on cuDNN, this setup will fail. Furthermore, it's worth pointing out that ZLUDA itself is currently being maintained as a "weekend hobby project" after losing its commercial backing a second time. Relying on this pipeline for production-level work remains a massive risk. This repository is a tinkerer's tool, not a corporate IT deployment strategy.

Despite these limitations, "CUDA-for-AMD-Windows" is pretty exciting, as it proves that the barrier to entry for running CUDA-exclusive software on AMD GPUs isn't an insurmountable hardware flaw, but a relatively tractable translation tooling problem. Because the project is entirely open-source, its potential extends far beyond this initial proof-of-concept. With community contributions, we could see expanded hardware detection and clever patches to get more stubborn CUDA libraries resolving properly.

If you believe that the 8-pin PCIe power connector is entirely immune to the problems that have plagued the newer 16-pin connector, think again. A recent incident suggests that even the humble 8-pin is not entirely immune to failure. According to a Radeon RX 7900 XTX owner on Reddit, the 8-pin connectors on a Thermal Grizzly WireView monitoring device suffered overheating damage while connected to the graphics card.

The user said that they experienced frequent freezes and black screens before discovering the damage. The affected connectors were the 8-pin connectors on the GPU side of the monitoring device, with visible signs of burning and melted plastic. The user also confirmed that the connectors were fully inserted, although the exact cause of the failure is still unknown.

WireView is essentially an adapter that sits between a graphics card and the power cables, allowing users to monitor various values like power consumption, voltages, current in amperes, minimum and maximum power consumption, and more. Rather than connecting the PSU cables directly to the GPU, the power passes through the monitoring device, thus adding another set of connectors and electrical contacts to the power delivery path. A poor electrical connection, increased contact resistance, a damaged connector, or an issue with the adapter itself could have caused the overheating damage.

Thermal Grizzly previously pointed to improper seating, backplate interference, or incorrectly aligned or soldered contacts as possible causes of connector damage, although the company is yet to identify the cause of this particular incident. The company has reportedly contacted the affected user and asked them to get in touch with its support team so the company can investigate the damaged WireView adapter. The investigation could potentially help determine whether the failure originated from the adapter, the connectors, the GPU, or a combination of factors.

While we are on the subject of 8-pin power connectors, just days ago we saw a heavily modified RTX 5090 successfully running on traditional 8-pin connectors. The modders replaced the card's original 16-pin connectors with three 8-pin connectors soldered directly to the PCB, using heavy-gauge cables and modified sense pins. The card reportedly pulled as much as 900W and reached 3,400 MHz, demonstrating how capable 8-pin connectors can be when properly implemented. However, this was an extreme hardware modification, not a stock configuration.

There is increasing evidence that Mexican drug cartels are diversifying into cryptocurrency mining and are using crypto platforms to diversify their income and, at the same time, launder their ill-gotten gains and fund other illegal activities. Reuters reports that local Mexican police uncovered a clandestine cryptocurrency farm in Tlaola, a town located in the leafy mountains of Puebla's Sierra Norte region. They found 300 GPUs, electricity infrastructure, and satellite equipment. The electricity-hungry operation likely drew power by secretly tapping into the grid at Presa de Necaxa, a nearby hydroelectric dam.

While this latest hidden facility found by police may seem small, Reuters notes it is the fourth such crypto farm Mexican authorities have uncovered in this region since early last year. According to a Mexico-based security analyst, the crypto farms discovered show that the cartels are increasingly sophisticated in their operations. In the latest bust, the Mexican federal authorities, the Navy, and state police seized around 300 GPUs, 80 medium-voltage terminations, a transformer, and eight satellite antennas.

It might not be surprising to hear about the Mexican cartels being tied up in crypto. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, as cited by Reuters, reckons illicit crypto transactions grew from $59 billion in 2024 to $154 billion last year. The firm links the surge recorded to sanctions evasion involving governments. However, in South America, cartels are increasingly interested in using this channel to launder money. The mining operations are also integrated into the scheme, as stealing electricity is easy for organized crime. Mainstream consumer GPU mining ended in H2 2022, flooding the market with used graphics cards.

The source report doesn’t say how authorities found the crypto farm. Perhaps locals in this remote area of Puebla alerted authorities to the operation. Two folks from neighboring communities told Reuters that they could hear the crypto farm noise (transformers, cooling) from a kilometer away (0.6 miles), and the place was apparently a mere 2 km (1.2 miles) from the nearest village. The other three recently uncovered crypto farms were also near the same HEP dam, it is noted. Tlaola is a small community with around 20,000 inhabitants, so the noise levels and power consumption of crypto farms are very perceptible even if the cartels try to hide them deep in the mountains.

Remote communities, such as Tlaola, are popular locations for clandestine crypto farms because the electricity is cheap and most of them are under the protection of the cartels. For example, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) and its armed branch, La Barredora, have the strongest presence in Puebla.

According to SILIKN, a Mexican cybersecurity firm, the use of cryptomining to launder illegal money rose by at least 55.8% last year in México. Drug cartels such as the Cartel de Sinaloa and the CJNG have set up crypto farms to mine Bitcoin (BTC), Monero (XMR), and Tether (USDT).

Similarly remote, illicit cryptomining facilities exist around the world, with Reuters recalling news of raids in Brazil, the U.S., and Thailand. Do you think there’s one near you? Please call the local police and liberate those stressed GPUs. Meanwhile, analysts expect crypto-related crime will reach new heights in the coming years.

It’s been a heck of a time lately for PC gamers willing to get their hands dirty with mods. Hot on the heels of the discovery of the DLSS 5 DLL in a prerelease version of NBA 2K27, modder dashdogy found a way to bring Multi Frame Generation, one of the crown jewels of GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards, to RTX 40-series (and earlier) products.

As already elevated graphics card prices seem set to continue rising, and hardware upgrades get further and further out of reach of the average PC gamer, more and more folks are going to want to hold on to the RTX 40-series hardware they have for as long as they can, especially if smoothness-boosting features like MFG are just a few clicks away on those older cards.

So we had to see MFG working on Ada for ourselves—assuming it works at all. We grabbed the mod files and got to playing with them in Cyberpunk 2077, since it’s likely in many TH readers’ Steam libraries already and has a healthy modding community. You can find the latest instructions for enabling MFG on Ada through dashdogy’s GitHub page.

Before spending a ton of time testing, we verified that the mod works at all. While spinning the camera at a high, constant speed, we could indeed see that increasing MFG multipliers beyond the officially supported 2X factor on Ada cards does greatly increase perceived smoothness or fluidity of motion in Cyberpunk 2077, as you would expect.

Another tell is that the same visual artifacts are visible in certain regions of the screen on both RTX 40-series and RTX 50-series graphics cards as you add more generated frames. MFG 4X and above, especially, tend to add some visual “junk” at the bottom of the frame that appears regardless of the game, and we could see that artifacting on Ada.

At least in Cyberpunk 2077, then, we’re confident that MFG is really doing its thing on RTX 40-series cards with this mod.

We also didn’t see any perceptible issues with frame pacing or frame delivery, although playing on a high-refresh-rate, G-Sync-Compatible monitor like our test bench’s ROG Strix XG27UCS smooths out all but the worst such issues. If you don’t have a high-resolution or high-refresh-rate monitor to begin with, the utility of MFG will be seriously limited for you anyway.

The latency question

So is this a free lunch? Is Nvidia soft-locking MFG to Blackwell purely for marketing reasons? That’s where performance testing comes in, since it has the potential to reveal whether there’s a catch in running MFG on Ada. The question is not so much whether MFG juices output frame rates, but whether it runs on Ada within acceptable latency thresholds.

As we’ve long emphasized, when you have essentially arbitrary control over output frame rates like MFG allows, input lag becomes the final barrier to a playable experience. So in the performance results that follow, we’ll certainly present output frame rates as you would expect. But you should view those in the context of your own monitor’s refresh rate. As long as the delivered frame rates we recorded exceed your display’s peak refresh rate, you have headroom to play with to keep your monitor at or near that number during gameplay.

The real issue, then, is whether both RTX 40-series and 50-series cards deliver an acceptable input latency under our test conditions. In our past testing, we’ve determined that a roughly 60ms average latency threshold, as indicated by Nvidia’s FrameView app, is the point at which player inputs and displayed frames start to become noticeably decoupled in AAA single-player experiences like Cyberpunk.

If you’re only slightly on the wrong side of this threshold, a game might still be playable, but if you totally blow past it, you’re likely to notice laggy inputs and increasingly distracting visual artifacts as the MFG model struggles to fill in the gaps between sparser and sparser input data.

Testing methods and notes

As one of the biggest technical showcases of the current PC gaming era, Cyberpunk 2077 lets us enable all the modern rendering features we’d want for Nvidia cards. It implements not only ray tracing and path tracing, but DLSS Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and Multi Frame Generation. The number of AI-generated pixels per frame can be quite high in this title.

We enabled all those features to expose the full potential complexity of running all of their associated AI models in a modern rendering pipeline. If RTX 40-series cards are going to stumble for some reason with modded MFG enabled, we want to put as many obstacles in their way as possible.

And because benchmarking the performance of an unofficial mod is venturing into the Wild West anyway, we also added a DLSS 5 mod to the mix to see whether Blackwell GPUs have a distinct edge in the neural rendering future that the arrival of that feature promises to usher in. DLSS 5 is supposed to come to RTX 40-series cards later this year, so we think it’s good to understand where performance sits today, even if it’s subject to the same disclaimers as this MFG mod.

For reference, then, we tested Cyberpunk with maxed-out raster settings, path tracing, and MFG 4X at three resolutions: 1080p with DLSS Balanced, 2560x1440 with DLSS Performance, and 4K with DLSS Ultra Performance upscaling enabled.

We only tested cards ranging from the RTX 4090 down to the RTX 4070 for these experiments, both because of time and Cyberpunk’s VRAM requirements. We didn’t want to deal with potential performance pitfalls due to running out of VRAM, so the 12GB RTX 4070 is where we’re drawing the line for now.

Modded Cyberpunk 2077 1080p performance

At 1080p, Cyberpunk 2077 with MFG 4X scales fine on Ada, but it’s clearly scaling better on Blackwell. The RTX 4090 lands between the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080. Introducing DLSS 5 to the mix doesn’t change any relative standings, although it does create some larger gaps between average frame rates and 1% lows than we might like on the RTX 4070 Ti Super, RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4070 Super, and RTX 4070. The RTX 5070 has no such trouble.

But again, the real story is in our latency results. Here, we can see that every card we tested falls under our 60ms threshold with MFG 4X alone. But Blackwell hardware has a clear advantage in the standings, as even the RTX 5070 delivers a lower input latency than the RTX 4090 with our DLSS 5 mod off and a comparable input latency with it enabled. All the other Ada cards shake out as you would expect from there. But in absolute terms, even with DLSS 5 enabled, only the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4070 are far beyond our acceptable latency thresholds.

Blackwell might have a latency edge with MFG enabled and a smoothness edge with a modded version of DLSS 5 on top, but at least with the RTX 4070 on up, there’s certainly enough headroom to use the feature on Ada.

And as we went to press, a version of the RTX 40-series MFG mod came out that removes the need for ReShade. That more streamlined approach might cut down latency, but we couldn’t test it because it currently crashes Cyberpunk 2077. Again, this is the Wild West, not a validated, bulletproof solution from Nvidia like you get with RTX 50-series products.

Modded Cyberpunk 2077 2560x1440 performance

At 2560x1440, generational performance standings and scaling between cards remains much the same as we saw at 1080p. The RTX 4090 still falls short of the RTX 5080, and the RTX 4080 duo falls behind the RTX 5070 Ti.

We also still see the wide gap between average frame rates and 1% lows rear its head on more Ada cards with our DLSS 5 mod enabled, though to be fair, these lows are still being smoothed over by MFG to the point that you’re unlikely to notice them with a high-refresh-rate, variable-refresh-rate monitor like we’re using.

On the latency side, all of the Ada cards except the RTX 4070 still run our modded MFG 4X with acceptable input latency. But enable the DLSS 5 mod we’re using, and input latency climbs past 60ms for all Ada cards except the RTX 4090. The RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4080 still provide acceptable performance under this full load, as they’re only slightly over our latency threshold. But for any less powerful RTX 40-series cards, you’d need to start choosing between DLSS 5 and other eye candy, like lighter RT settings instead of path tracing or no RT or PT at all.

Modded Cyberpunk 2077 4K performance

Our modded performance results at 4K with DLSS Ultra Performance demonstrate why it’s so important to discuss MFG-boosted frame rates in the context of input latency. If you’re not mentally dividing by four, everything on our output frame rate might look playable.

At this high output resolution, the RTX 4090 finally takes the lead over the RTX 5080, both with plain MFG 4X and with our DLSS 5 mod on top. The 16GB of VRAM of the RTX 4070 Ti Super would seem to be giving it an edge over the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 5070, and the RTX 4080 duo would seem to beat out the RTX 5070 Ti.

Our latency chart for MFG 4X shows a weird, but entirely reproducible result: input latencies at 4K with DLSS Ultra Performance are actually much lower than they are at 2560x1440 for most Ada cards, despite the fact that both of these output resolution targets share the same input resolution.

We’re not sure why Ada cards run into such a latency hump with this MFG mod at 2560x1440 with DLSS Performance, but we double-checked our results, and this behavior is reproducible. Blackwell cards experience the more linear rise in input latency as output resolutions rise that you would expect.

Again, this is the Wild West of modded performance, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves here, but it’s an unfortunate result given the prevalence of 2560x1440 monitors. Perhaps the maintainers of this mod can track down the root cause and fix it, but nothing is guaranteed.

In any event, input latency with MFG 4X alone at 4K with DLSS Ultra Performance isn’t an issue for any card here. You might be pushing your luck with the RTX 4070, but both Blackwell and Ada cards are delivering on the promise of MFG here: smoother output with responsive input.

Add DLSS 5 to the latency picture, though, and as we’ve come to expect, you really want an RTX 5090, RTX 4090, or RTX 5080 for acceptable responsiveness. And you’re pushing it with the RTX 5080. No other cards in this bunch need apply.

Bottom line

Our experience with the purportedly Blackwell-exclusive Multi Frame Generation on RTX 40-series cards through modding suggests that there isn’t any glaring reason why Nvidia couldn’t enable the feature for Ada Lovelace cards, and that’s kind of wild given how heavily it was touted as a Blackwell-exclusive feature back when those cards launched.

At least as long as Nvidia doesn’t find a persistent way to lock it out, our experience is that MFG generally just works on Ada. Even if input latencies aren’t quite as low on those older cards as they are on comparable Blackwell hardware, all else equal, they’re still perfectly acceptable, even under the combined load of path tracing, DLSS Super Resolution, DLSS Ray Reconstruction, and MFG 4X in Cyberpunk 2077.

We only had time to test cards ranging down to the RTX 4070 for this quick look, but for folks looking to extend the useful life of their Ada hardware, the availability of MFG could certainly stretch those cards’ lifespans.

But our experience also shows that MFG on Ada isn’t perfect. It’s still a mod in active development, and the unusual and reproducible input latency behavior we charted at 1440p on RTX 40-series cards is the sort of unexpected pitfall you might expect from an unofficial implementation of the feature. Cross your fingers that it’s an issue that can be fixed by the community.

The fact that MFG works as well as it does on Ada, even in this modded form, also makes us wonder whether Nvidia might just enable official support for it at some point, given the apparently bleak prospects for gaming graphics card pricing and future hardware generations as the AI boom shows no signs of abating. And such a move would provide much broader and more immediate performance relief for gamers than re-introducing ancient silicon like the RTX 3060.

Given that Nvidia is already working on bringing DLSS 5 to RTX 40-series GPUs, maybe this mod will convince it to throw in official MFG support, too. Fingers crossed.

A Reddit user has stumbled upon a GPU jackpot by claiming two old cryptocurrency mining rigs with 12 Zotac-branded Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics cards. The machines were reportedly used during the COVID-era mining boom and had been sitting unused in a basement, probably since the day Ethereum mining became unprofitable. The discovery was shared on the r/PCMasterRace subreddit, and judging by the photos, all of the parts look surprisingly undamaged despite the long period in a basement.

Apart from the graphics cards, the setup also features an MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Plus motherboard, a 1000W Gold-rated Rosewill power supply, two 4GB sticks of DDR4 RAM, and a pair of 120GB solid-state drives. Upon closer inspection of the GPUs, the Reddit user noticed minor silicone bleeding across most of the cards, which is a common occurrence caused by thermal pads breaking down and releasing oil over time. Commenters pointed out that while the cards might require a clean-up with isopropyl alcohol, as well as new thermal pads and thermal paste, the hardware is very likely salvageable.

Launched in 2020 as an upper mid-range graphics card, the RTX 3070 is based on Nvidia’s Ampere architecture with 5,888 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR6 memory. It was designed to deliver strong 1440p gaming performance and became one of the more popular GPUs of its generation. The card also arrived during the cryptocurrency mining boom, where its combination of performance and power efficiency made it attractive to miners.

GPUs used for mining aren't necessarily a bad proposition for gaming. Mining rigs were often configured to run GPUs at reduced core voltages and power levels to lower temperatures as well as electricity costs. This also helped in reducing stress on the silicon itself when compared to standard gaming.

For now, the Reddit user does not plan to keep all 12 graphics cards for themselves. Their first step is to test the RTX 3070s individually to find out how many are still in working condition. If most of the cards pass testing without issues, the user says they plan to sell 10 or 11 of the GPUs and keep at least one for themselves. With each RTX 3070 carrying 8GB of VRAM, the haul represents 96GB of VRAM in total, which in today's economy is a valuable amount of graphics memory, particularly due to the soaring prices of newer GPUs.

The GeForce RTX 5090 is already at the pinnacle of the best graphics cards. However, Shenzhen Suqiao Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., a Chinese OEM/ODM, has reportedly made it even more powerful by outfitting the Blackwell flagship with 96GB of memory, 3X more than the original. The company is already selling these modified GeForce RTX 5090 96GB on Alibaba for $3888, 35% less than the vanilla GeForce RTX 5090 in the U.S.

You can say whatever you want about China, but you cannot deny that factories there have produced some of the most interesting modified graphics cards, including the GeForce RTX 5080 32GB, the GeForce RTX 4090 48GB, and the GeForce RTX 3090 48GB. While some of these projects are fueled by pure curiosity, most of them are a result of the recent AI boom that has stimulated Chinese factories to think outside the box and give existing and even past graphics cards a memory upgrade so consumers can repurpose them for AI workloads. While we have seen a fair share of absurd rumors, such as the GeForce RTX 5090 128GB, the conjuration of the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB seems more plausible from a technical standpoint, and there is precedent for a Blackwell-based graphics card with 96GB of memory.

Before diving into the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB, it is worth noting that the Alibaba listing is from Suqiao, a Chinese manufacturer with over 10 years of experience making graphics cards, motherboards, and servers. So it is not a random Chinese chop shop but rather an established OEM/ODM, which lends some credence to the existence of the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB. Needless to say, the Alibaba listing is full of questionable specifications, such as GDDR6X memory or memory speeds of 14 Gbps.

The RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell, which has 96GB of GDDR7 memory, uses the same GB202 silicon as the GeForce RTX 5090, but with more enabled Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). Therefore, a 96GB configuration is possible on GB202; however, the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB likely uses a custom PCB, allowing the manufacturer to install the memory chips in clamshell mode, which doubles the total memory on the PCB. The vendor could either procure the GB202 silicon individually or extract it from mainstream GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards and reball it onto the custom PCB.

Even in clamshell mode, with memory pads on both sides of the PCB, there are only 32 of them. The RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell has 32 GDDR7 chips, each 24Gb (3GB) in capacity. The problem we have with the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB that raises a red flag about its authenticity is the mention of GDDR6X. Micron only produced GDDR6X memory chips in 16 Gb (2GB), so the maximum capacity would be 48GB in clamshell mode. Plus, GDDR6X operates between 19 Gbps and 24 Gbps, much higher than the listed 14 Gbps, which corresponds to standard GDDR6.

Modified firmware and software-level hacks are necessary to run Nvidia graphics cards with modified memory capacity. For instance, the GeForce RTX 4090 48GB was possible because modders modified Nvidia's firmware to get these graphics cards running. However, rumors on the street suggest that a leaked firmware for the GeForce RTX 5090 has been available for a few months, which could explain why we are starting to see these GeForce RTX 5090 96GB graphics cards surface.

Suqiao listed the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB for $3,888, significantly lower than other Alibaba merchants who have it closer to $5,900. For reference, custom GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards start at $6,000 in the U.S. market. After the latest price hikes, Nvidia is selling the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell for $16,000, although it can go up to $17,999, depending on which variant you pick up. If the GeForce RTX 5090 96GB is real, even at $6,000, it would be a steal for anyone running AI models.

Discrete graphics card shipments for desktop PCs in Q2 2026 totaled 12.5 million units, the highest number since Q1 2022 despite record-high prices and cratering shipments of desktop CPUs, according to findings from Jon Peddie Research. The result highlights a broader trend that shows that unit sales of standalone GPUs for gaming have so far remained immune to rising prices, perhaps because gamers are expecting even higher prices in the coming quarters.

The industry shipped 12.5 million standalone graphics cards for desktop PCs in the second quarter of 2026, up around 5.9% sequentially and 7.8% year-over-year. 12.5 million add-in boards (AIBs) is the highest number of graphics cards sold in one quarter since the first quarter of 2022, when the industry shipped 13.38 million AIBs.

It is particularly noteworthy that 2026 is shaping up to be better for unit sales of desktop graphics boards than 2025 despite raising prices. For the first half of 2026, 24.3 million desktop AIBs were shipped, up significantly from 20.8 million graphics cards supplied in the first half of 2026. JPR analysts also note that only around 14 million desktop PCs were sold during the quarter, which — given an unusually high 89% attach rate — largely means that the majority of AIBs shipped during the quarter were aimed at gamers buying in retail and not at PC makers.

"Defying common wisdom, high-end AIB sales spiked as prices increased," said Jon Peddie, president of JPR. "Our theory is consumers rushed to buy AIBs before the prices went any higher, as the war in Iran is driving prices up in all segments."

Having shipped about 11.25 million discrete GPUs for desktop computers in Q2 2026, Nvidia remained the undisputed leader of the market with around 90% market share. AMD controlled roughly 8% of the market, shipping about one million discrete desktop GPUs, while Intel's share increased to 2% on shipments of several hundred thousand units. Meanwhile, Jon Peddie Research notes that market share changes were negligible during the quarter: AMD’s overall AIB market share decreased by -0.16% from the previous quarter, Intel's market share increased by 0.3%, and Nvidia's market share decreased by -0.1%.

For Nvidia, the quarter was particularly good as it sold the highest quantity of discrete GPUs for desktop PCs in a single quarter since Q3 2017, when it sold approximately 11.72 million units. By contrast, sales of AMD's standalone graphics cards have been floating below or around one million units per quarter for nearly four years now, with only three quarters being exceptions (Q3 2023, Q4 2023, Q4 2024). Still, one million is higher than the around 700 thousand discrete desktop GPUs the company sold in Q2 2025.

In total, Nvidia shipped approximately 17.365 million discrete graphics processors in the second quarter: roughly 11.25 million units went to desktops, and around 6.115 million units were installed into notebook and compact PCs. Since both AMD and Intel have quietly quit the market for standalone GPUs for mobile PCs, their shipments to this market segment were essentially zero.

Modders at the YouTube channel TecLab have created what is being called the world’s first RTX 5090 powered by traditional 8-pin PCIe connectors. Not only were the modders able to successfully power up the graphics card, but they also proved that the older connector is still quite capable of handling the extreme power demands of a modern high-end GPU.

The card chosen for the experiment was a Galax GeForce RTX 5090D HOF OC LAB XOC, which is a top-of-the-line model that features a beefy cooler as well as dual 16-pin power connectors. The modders essentially dismantled the entire graphics card along with the dual 16-pin power connectors, stripping it down to just the bare PCB. Next, three 8-pin power connectors were installed at the rear, with each connector soldered directly to the power regulators on the PCB using heavy-gauge cables. Additionally, the sense pins had to be rewired to ensure that the card could reach its maximum power load without any restrictions. To keep the temperatures in check, they used a liquid cooling system with a GPU block.

An 8-pin PCIe power connector is officially rated for 150W, although its actual maximum capacity is much higher. During the one-hour livestream, the modders tested the GPU by gradually increasing the power draw, starting at 400W and going all the way up to 900W using three 8-pin power cables. At its peak, the modified RTX 5090 pulled more than 120A, with clock speeds reaching as high as 3,400 MHz. Notably, the mod was limited to only the hardware level, with no software or BIOS tweaks performed.

To further test the capability of the 8-pin connectors, the modders tested the modified RTX 5090 with just two cables. The overall power draw dropped to 66A, while clock speeds remained at a respectable 3,200 MHz. Going a step further, the card was tested with just one cable, which surprisingly only dropped the figures down to 65A and 3,100 MHz.

Despite the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) revising the 16-pin power connector (12V-2x6) to improve reliability, reports of melting GPU connectors continue to haunt gamers. The issue is particularly more common among high-performance models, though not limited to Nvidia RTX 50 and RTX 40 series, as certain AMD Radeon graphics with the 16-pin connector are also at risk. TecLab's experiment shows that GPU manufacturers may want to reconsider the tried-and-tested 8-pin connector and explore whether it could still be a viable option in high-end graphics cards.

A few years ago, Nvidia was expected to release the RTX 3070 Ti with as much as 16GB of VRAM instead of the 8GB we actually ended up getting. Only database listings ultimately indicated its existence until a physical prototype showed up, but we never really got to see it working. Fast forward to today, however, and Brazilian YouTuber fmklab, aka Fabian, has recreated the card on his own. Using an RTX 3070 PCB with a transplanted 3070 Ti core and GDDR6 chips from Samsung, fmklab broughall those parts together to achieve a 16GB memory pool.

The card was stripped down to its PCB, and the RTX 3070 GPU was removed and replaced with a 3070 Ti chip. The reason for the swap is that the RTX 3070 uses GDDR6 instead of the GDDR6X the retail version of the RTX 3070 Ti is equipped with, which presented an interesting challenge.

Fabian could've put all 16GB of GDDR6X memory on a 3070 Ti card, but it would've been far too expensive, so he swapped the Samsung-made HC14 (8Gb) GDDR6 chips that were already on the board with HC16 (16Gb) chips. That changed the VRAM capacity from 8GB to 16GB, but when the card booted, GPU-Z only recognized 8GB. The PCB's memory straps needed to be reconfigured in order for it to use the entire memory pool.

Using the Nvidia BIOS Reader tool, Fabian figured out exactly what straps to adjust and went ahead with the soldering process. Afterward, MATS properly recognized the full 16GB VRAM capacity with no errors. GPU-Z also showed the RTX 3070 Ti equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, similar to the prototype that popped up years ago. But verifying that the card recognized the additional VRAM was just the first step.

To actually test his creation's performance, Fabian ran a local LLM on the GPU to see if it would allocate more than 8GB and found that it used nearly the entire 16GB pool. Call of Duty: Warzone ate more than 13GB of VRAM while paired with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, exhibiting no signs of instability.

Fabian even linked a Unigine Superposition benchmark in the video's description as proof of the card's existence, where he scored 5,367 points, which is actually lower than most real 3070 Ti runs. That's probably because of the decreased memory bandwidth of GDDR6 versus that chip's stock GDDR6X, which is the biggest tradeoff for the higher capacity.

Overall, this was a successful experiment and possibly the only working 3070 Ti 16GB in the world, but there comes a point of diminishing returns. A 3070 Ti is still a powerful card, but it gets smoked by current-gen Blackwell options even with less memory. It would be much more reasonable to buy, say, an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB if you actually need better performance with some future proofing today, not to mention the superior efficiency, feature set, and after-sales support you'd get from a new Blackwell card.

There are now several mods enabling DLSS 5 on older Nvidia GPUs, along with even AMD's RDNA 4 cards. Similarly, Nvidia's multi-frame gen has also been ported to prior generations. It can get a bit confusing to keep track of all these developments, and that's where "DLSS Unlocked" comes in. It's a new mod from ShyVox that combines OptiScaler_DLSSNR with DLSS Enabler to bring DLSS 5 and DLSS MFG to all RTX GPUs: Turning, Ampere, and Ada.

DLSS Unlocked serves as a sort of all-in-one package for owners of RTX 20-, RTX 30-, and RTX 40-series looking to enjoy the latest Nvidia goodies on both Windows and Linux. It takes two separate mods developed by other community members and organizes them into one seamless, unified release. You download the executable from GitHub or Nexus Mods and just select the root directory of the game you want to try it on.

As for the requirements, the game must use the DirectX 12 API and already support both DLSS upscaling and frame generation natively. You need to provide your own patched DLSS 5 DLL as well, for legal reasons. The two mods comprising DLSS Unlocked also have their own peculiarities. OptiScaler_DLSSNR is simple; it just uses OptiScaler to add neural rendering on top, but DLSS Enabler works in a more complicated manner.

On RTX 20- and RTX 30-series GPUs, you'll be using AMD's FSR 3.1 to interpolate all of the frames instead of using Nvidia's pipeline. On RTX 40-series, the second frame is generated through DLSS-G (regular frame-gen), but the rest of the frames are handled by FSR 3.1 to get you up to 6X MFG. That handoff is itself possible thanks to another mod called DLSSG to FSR3. See how this web of tweaks can get a bit confusing?

You also need to keep in mind that this is a different approach compared to DLSS 5 Swapper, which enables DLSS 5 inside any game through ReShade (using RenoDX). For DLSS Unlocked, the game must already support DLSS 2/3 upscaling for it to be patched into DLSS 5 and unlock MFG. That's how OptiScaler_DLSSNR works, which DLSS Unlocked relies on.

None of these mods should be used with multiplayer games because the anti-cheat software can detect them as threats and potentially ban you. Ultimately, when you have DLSS Unlocked installed, a DLSS-compatible game should now have DLSS 5 neural rendering while having its frames interpolated up to 4x. You definitely need that, considering DLSS 5 comes with a massive compute cost that can purportedly even melt RTX 5090s.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series (codenamed Blackwell) graphics cards continue to rank among the best graphics cards available today. As a result, these highly sought-after Blackwell graphics cards have become prime targets for criminals seeking to scam unsuspecting buyers. Although scams involving hollow graphics cards are not new, their growing frequency and spread are cause for concern. The latest reports from Germany have revealed at least two buyers who fell prey to the same scam, reportedly from the same seller.

Hollow or phantom graphics cards may not be colloquial terms you hear every day. They basically refer to graphics cards that lack the silicon and memory chips. Criminals remove these components and sell non-functional graphics cards to their prey. Logically, you have no way of knowing these components are not present until you disassemble the graphics card, something that the average consumer does not do. Swindlers have run similar scams with fake memory modules without integrated circuits, or SSDs with microSD cards inside.

The first report, as recounted by respected hardware enthusiast Roman “der8auer” Hartung, uncovers a poor victim who bought a second-hand Palit GeForce RTX 5090 GameRock OC for around $2,090 (1,800 euros). The seller’s asking price was suspicious since a brand-new one starts at around $5,805 (4,999 euros) in Germany. Even for a used one, the dramatic price difference indicates a potential scam.

Many of these scams happen through online transactions. So the buyer went so far as to meet the seller in person, hoping a face-to-face interaction would ensure the graphics card was legit. It did not make a difference, though, because the buyer did not have a system to test the graphics card on the spot. In the end, it was a matter of taking the seller's word for it, and that turned out horribly.

A second report has emerged from a member of the Hardwareluxx forums, who reportedly fell victim to the same deceptive seller. Tragically, this individual ended up paying close to $2,613 (2,250 euros) for the phantom graphics card.

In both cases, the scammer put on a friendly facade and provided what seemed like legitimate paperwork to bolster the buyers' trust. For the first victim, the seller shared an invoice showing the purchase of two graphics cards, claiming to sell one because they no longer needed it. Similarly, in the second case, the scammer furnished an invoice to convince the buyer of the transaction’s legitimacy.

The use of realistic invoices is a growing trend among fraudsters. The first buyer uncovered that the serial number printed on the graphics card itself did not match the serial number listed on the packaging. The second buyer discovered that the serial numbers on the invoice and the packaging matched, but the seller deliberately scratched off the serial number on the graphics card.

The AI gold rush will not be over anytime soon, so we do not expect graphics card pricing to improve. This gives scammers more motivation to prey on buyers' desire for a graphics card and lure them in with prices that seem too good to be true. The two incidents serve as a cautionary tale for anyone trying to procure a graphics card, especially from second-hand sources.

Not that long ago, we reported that Nvidia was dusting off the blueprints for the RTX 3060, in its 12 GB form. At the time, we'd spotted it in stores for about $339.99, but just like with ever-climbing memory, hard drive, and SSD prices, two months passed is an eternity. The same cards are now selling for $489 new, and one particular specimen is the SRhonyra RTX 3060 12 GB Low Profile card, for $495.59.

• SRhonyra RTX 3060 12 GB Low Profile card - $495.59

This card and its price may raise more than a few eyebrows, but there are reasons why it exists. First off, it's a one-slot model, making it easy to put many of them to work in the same machine with relatively little concern for airflow. They have no power inputs and rely on 70 W delivered by the PCIe slot alone, eschewing the need for a high-end PSU and lots of cables. Third, the low-profile form factor makes it possible to place them in potent puny personal computers.

Attentive readers might surmise that one (or more) of these would be good candidates for an entry-level local LLM rig. That's precisely how SRhonyra is pitching the card, calling it "capable of local AI" and "running 7B [to] 13B LLMs." A standard-dimensioned, fully powered RTX 3060 is capable of drawing a maximum of 175 W, so it's fair to assume the performance of the diminutive variant will sit below that of its full-sized brethren, given it ought to only draw 70 W of juice from the PCIe slot.

Even then, it's likely that people interested in these cards are looking to use them either as secondary GPUs, or use more than one in the same box to be able to virtually pool their VRAM and use larger models than you'd otherwise be able to. The low power draw also means they're a simple, thoughtless drop-in to an existing system, whereas larger, more power-hungry cards require careful consideration with physical spacing (or lack thereof), power supply sizing, and ever-annoying cables.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering technology has taken the PC gaming world by storm since its recent leak and then official rollout in recent days. In what might be one of the most impressive technical applications and mods of the feature yet, one developer has showcased DLSS 5 running on a second GPU to share the processing load, rendering the game on the first GPU before applying Neural rendering at the end of the frame, thus boosting the performance of neural-rendered frames.

Marcelo Guibout shared the demonstration online, with videos showing the process running on a cinematic video from The Blood of Dawnwalker, as well as Cyberpunk 2077. Guibout was quick to clarify that the videos are technical showcases, not benchmarks. However, they did share some performance figures. More exciting still, you can download the project from GitHub and try it for yourself. However, the technique does require a second display and doubles the display latency.

The above demonstration features a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32GB DDR5 setup with two Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPUs, with both cards using PCIe 5.0 x8, and a display attached to each card. The ReShade add-on, dubbed MGPU Bridge, reads each finished frame before applying Nvidia's Neural rendering. "Neural rendering happens at the end of the frame: it takes a finished frame and hands a finished frame back," they explain. "That is what makes it possible to pick it up and run it somewhere else. The add-on creates its own D3D12 device on your second GPU, sends each finished frame across to it, runs DLSS-NR there, and displays the result on that card's own monitor — so nothing has to come back. The render GPU does no neural work at all and runs cooler for the same reason."

In the TBOD demo at 1080p, they shared the following performance numbers:

Guibout clarified that DLSS super-resolution is running in every column of the test, with the rows showing each mode tested. The game rendered at the same internal resolution in all three columns, with the first column giving figures with DLSS 5's neural rendering switched off, representing the ceiling for performance. As you can see, running DLSS 5 on the second card in this dual-GPU setup drastically increases performance in every mode.

"The frame rates are not the finding. The slope is: what you gain by going from DLAA down to Ultra Performance, and how much of that available gain each arm keeps," Guibout explains. "Neural post-processing saturates whatever device it runs on, and it always runs at output resolution. Its cost barely falls as you drop the DLSS mode, while the render work collapses. On the render card it therefore eats a larger and larger share of every frame, and upscaling stops paying for itself: you keep about a third of what the machine actually had to give. Move it to the second card and you keep 86% of it."

Other benefits include temperature reductions on the rendering card, with the first GPU running 21 degrees cooler without the neural load.

Guibout is cautious to note this isn't a return to Nvidia's SLI technology, which would split the workload of frame rendering between two GPUs. They also noted plainly this is not Nvidia's vision for DLSS 5 and lacks the native integration of official DLSS 5 support.

You can see the original demo for TBOD below:

As commenters online have noted, the method seems more akin to using Nvidia's dedicated PhysX cards, with plenty of potential for gamers who have the capacity to run a dual GPU setup. The second demo features a Ryzen 5 5600 on a DDR4 system, so top-of-the-line hardware isn't required to make it happen.

The RTX 5090 is no stranger to controversy thanks to the incendiary nature of its 16-pin connector. When you add something as taxing as DLSS 5, which comes with a heavy increase in power draw, to an already dangerous mix, you're just cooking up a recipe for disaster. And it seems like this recipe has likely claimed its first victim. HardOCP forum member Erek claimed their RTX 5090 fell prey to the woes of the 16-pin connector yesterday, as it melted while testing DLSS 5 in NBA 2K27.

The irony is not lost on us that NBA 2K27 is the only game that officially supports DLSS 5 right now — everything else is modded — yet it still reportedly killed the user's MSI RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC, which carries a 575W TDP. However, during testing, erek reported his GPU going past 600W, with GPU-Z showing it hovering above 610W consistently, not just as a spike. Before this, the card only consumed around 450W while gaming, implying that DLSS 5 added more than 150W to the power draw.

While the 16-pin connector is capable of carrying up to 600W of power, the PCIe x16 slot the card is plugged into also provides 75W on its own. So, the connector wasn't necessarily drawing over 600W alone. Tragedy struck right after as Erek's RTX 5090 started exhibiting signs of instability and eventually stopped working entirely. The owner smelled something burning and, sure enough, found the 16-pin connector pulling an age-old classic: melting.

The plastic on the connector had melted enough to bond with the cable, making it very difficult to separate the two. Once they did come undone, the damage was clearly visible, with at least five pins on the 16-pin cable scorched; one pin's housing had completely melted away. This was a yellow-tipped cable, too, meant to ensure it was plugged all the way in. Despite the fact that we only got a blurry picture of the connector on the GPU, the little yellow dot of melted plastic almost comically stands out amidst a sea of black and grey.

We can't confirm whether DLSS 5 was actually responsible for burning Erek's card. After all, an RTX 5090 meeting its maker is a monthly tradition at this point, and the cause is usually tied to a loose fit between the connector and the cable. However, our own testing does align with how the enthusiast came up with their DLSS 5 hypothesis. We saw the MSI Lightning Z variant of the 5090, which has 2x 16-pin connectors and a 1,000W XOC BIOS, pull 800W in Control with DLSS 5 enabled. Without DLSS 5, the same GPU pulled just 691W.

That wasn't even the most egregious difference; in Hogwarts Legacy, we went from 480W without DLSS 5 to a whopping 720W with it enabled. That's a 50% increase in power draw for just one feature. The same game made the Founder's Edition of the 5090 pull 417W without the neural rendering tech involved, and 547W with it toggled on. So even in the standard version of the GPU with a single 16-pin connector, there's a 31% jump in power consumption because of DLSS 5.

Considering Erek's 5090 model lands somewhere between those two, and given his own testing showing a severe power budget imbalance, it's not unreasonable to assume DLSS 5 was the culprit. Had the user's GPU been acting weird before they tried the new feature, we might be having a different conversation. But it's clear that Nvidia has a lot of work to do before DLSS 5 makes its way onto the RTX 40-series down the line. Performance improvements aside, the safety concerns stemming from poor efficiency also need to be addressed.

Nvidia launched the GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB) in early 2021 as an affordable mainstream gaming GPU with a 170W TDP, before re-releasing two months ago to offer relief during the ongoing component crisis. Throughout this time, not one person thought that the 3060 consumed too much power... except someone in China who decided to make a 75W version of the card. This blower-style variant has no 6- or 8-pin power connectors and runs entirely off the PCIe slot it'll be connected to, resulting in some expectedly underwhelming performance.

The RTX 3060 takes very well to undervolting and, therefore, can already be taken all the way down to just 100W at the cost of modestly reduced performance. A single PCIe x16 slot can provide up to 75W of power, so forcing a 3060 down to that number requires a shunt mod. This practice is usually associated with unlocking power limits on a GPU to chase overclocking feats where you decrease resistance, but in this case, you'd be increasing it.

This is a single-slot, low-profile card with a blower-style cooler about the size of a modern smartphone. You get just 1x HDMI and 1x DisplayPort in terms of connectivity. There is no fin stack present either, the PCB lacks a backplate, and the shroud is a thin metal sheet responsible for all the heat dissipation with a rudimentary heatsink in the middle.

A teardown of the GPU on BiliBili shows it's under-equipped from the inside, too. The memory chips have no thermal pads or paste on them. Instead, the metal shroud just touches the core directly to keep the entire thing cool. Remember that there's just one fan at the far end to blow hot air; there is no intake or proper airflow with positive pressure. So far, everything about this card, except its compact size, is looking subpar.

Once we get to testing, any skepticism is validated as the 75W RTX 3060 GPU is barely able to edge past 900 MHz, despite being rated for 1,770 MHz boost clocks. This results in a Time Spy score of just 4,821 points whereas a regular RTX 3060 easily scores upwards of 9,000 points in the same benchmark. Even older budget GPUs like AMD's iconic RX 580 and Nvidia's equally-popular GTX 1060 score more.

During the Time Spy run, the GPU hotspot also went past 90 degrees Celsius, proving that the cooler is barely performing if it's struggling to tame even a 75W card. Clearly, this GPU was suffering from severe thermal throttling on top of already having its power budget more than halved. One could make an argument that it's still an Ampere GPU, so it could make sense in low-power, compact systems. But there are now mini PCs with similarly performing or far more potent integrated graphics in 2026.

PAX West is underway at the Seattle Convention Center in Seattle, Washington, and Nvidia is offering a selection of its Founder's Edition GPUs at MSRP. Nvidia has RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 models available while supplies last, along with packs of GeForce Trading Cards Series 1. Jacob Freeman, GeForce Evangelist at Nvidia, shared the announcement on X, telling interested gamers to "come find me" if they want a GPU.

Nvidia's Verified Priority Access (VPA) is a lottery program for Founder's Edition cards that the company launched in 2022 for RTX 40-series GPUs. It returned in 2025 for RTX 50-series GPUs, and although you can still sign up for the program online, Nvidia has seemingly shifted to offering MSRP GPUs during live events. Last month, the company did something similar at QuakeCon in Austin, Texas.

Over the past month, we've seen a sharp rise in the price of Nvidia's highest-end graphics cards in our GPU price tracker, with the $1,999 RTX 5090 now regularly listed for above $5,000. The RTX 5090 has been a particular flashpoint due to its plentiful 32GB of GDDR7 memory, making it ideal not only for flagship gaming performance but also (relatively) low-cost local AI inference.

Earlier this month, however, we saw increases as large as 39% in median list price for RTX 50-series GPUs, following a series of reports about regional price increases outside of the U.S. The increases hit the middle of Nvidia's Blackwell stack the hardest, with the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB jumping by 29% and RTX 5070 jumping by 36%.

The RTX 5090 has continued to rise in price, even after the hike we saw early last month. At the time, the median price was $4,699.99, but now, you'll spend at least $5,000 on a GPU online. Deals, if you can call them that, are available on the RTX 5090 if you have a Micro Center nearby, with models going down as low as $4,200.

This week, Nvidia launched DLSS 5 for RTX 50-series GPUs in NBA 2K27, following a leaked DLL that allowed modders to get Neural Rendering operational in just about any game. Within days, the community got DLSS 5 operational on RTX 40-series GPUs, as well as older RTX 30-series GPUs, though performance was unplayable on the latter. Nvidia says it plans to bring DLSS 5 support to RTX 40-series GPUs at a later date.

Although Nvidia doesn't have a booth at PAX West 2026, many of its partners do, including Starforge Systems, Razer, and Lenovo. Freeman says he'll be posting updates on X on where and when attendees can find him.

DLSS 5 officially debuted inside NBA 2K27 yesterday with more games to follow down the line, along with RTX 40-series support planned for the future. However, if you don't own a GPU from either of those families, the modding community has once again stepped up to offer a workaround. Developer danielblnc has figured out a way to make DLSS 5 work on AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs (RX 9000 series). As long as you're playing a DirectX 12 game with FSR support, "DLSS-NR-on-AMD" can inject DLSS 5 inside it.

The project is closed-source, so we don't know exactly how it works but we can make a few educated guesses. The mod is likely using a dynamic wrapper to intercept NGX API calls and fool the DLSS 5 DLL into loading on an AMD GPU. Once loaded, it extracts the AI model and Tensor data inside that DLL and converts those calculations into math AMD's matrix accelerators can understand via the HIP RT backend (rather than translating CUDA).

It then hooks into the game's FSR pipeline to run that frame data through the neural model and produce the same quality results you would get on an actual RTX 50-series GPU, just without any of the Tensor cores. DLSS-NR-on-AMD doesn't work on any game requiring anti-cheat. Even in single-player titles the performance is not great, especially since the RX 9070 XT is the top-end RDNA 4 GPU available.

Initially, Cyberpunk 2077 was running at 28 FPS at 1080p on the 9070 XT with DLSS 5 on, but a patch has been released that improves the frame rate by 12% to a stable 30 FPS. Another update has added a 2% boost but that's likely negligible. Performance reports from users online are a bit less optimistic. The ultimate goal is to get performance similar to an RTX 5070 Ti, which is not far-fetched since both GPUs are matched in raster and very close in ray tracing.

If you want to try it yourself, just head on over to the GitHub page and grab the latest release (it's an executable). Inside, you won't find the DLSS 5 DLL; you have to provide a "legally-obtained" copy yourself, as the repo points out. Currently, only NBA 2K27 natively supports DLSS 5 and that's where the DLL was originally leaked from. Anyways, once you have it, move the DLL and the executable inside the game's bin folder. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish installation.

Open the game, select FSR 3 or 4 from the in-game graphics settings, and press the End key to bring up the custom menu. This menu allows you to adjust individual parameters like structure and tone, similar to how the ReShade mod works in other games. You see the changes in real-time and it looks just as "good" as the non-intercepted DLSS 5. Don't expect any miracles because DLSS 5 is already very compute heavy and you're adding extra overhead by running it on non-compatible hardware.

Sure, both the RTX 50-series and the RX 9000 series support FP8 formats but DLSS 5 is meant to run on Tensor cores; not AMD's dual-issue AI accelerators. However, since the RTX 40-series also has Tensor cores and native FP8 support, Nvidia has confirmed that DLSS 5 will eventually make its way onto last-gen silicon as well. As for DLSS-NR-on-AMD, users have been able to get it running on RX 7000 series, but performance is once again abysmal because of the lack of FP8 support.

The GitHub repo does mention RDNA 3 support being explored but there are no plans for it at the moment. There is a lot of work to be done just to get the RX 9070 XT performance on the level of the 5070 Ti first. Ultimately, the ambition of the modding community never fails to impress because this is the slowest DLSS 5 on RDNA 4 will ever be. Nvidia's efforts to optimize DLSS 5 on its own hardware will, inadvertently, improve this mod as well as time goes on.

After a heavily scrutinized announcement earlier this year and a very revealing past few days, DLSS 5 has finally, officially launched inside NBA 2K27. A sports game is a bit of an unusual choice to showcase what is seemingly the next big leap in real-time rendering, but it's the only game DLSS 5 works with for now. Fortunately, you don't need an RTX 50-series GPU to enjoy it, as Nvidia has confirmed that the tech is coming to previous-gen RTX 40-series hardware as well, though we don't know exactly when.

Nvidia has worked closely with developer Visual Concepts to leverage DLSS 5 as an aid rather than the foundation of NBA 2K27. The game still uses scanned 3D models of all the players to form the base geometry. Then, DLSS 5 combines training data and engine data to infer things like lighting and shadows, upgrading the scene to look more photorealistic. Such engine-level implementation allows devs to fine-tune the end result as per their creative intent instead of just applying a global AI filter over everything.

DLSS 5 will come to other titles soon, but for now it's limited to NBA 2K27, and even then, it's extremely taxing. Nvidia's own marketing shows DLSS 5 netting 370 FPS at 4K with an RTX 5090, compared to 240 FPS with DLSS turned off. What it doesn't highlight as clearly is that the 370 FPS number comes from 6x MFG — five fake frames being interpolated for every real frame. That means the game is actually running at ~61 FPS; turning on DLSS 5 tanked performance by four times compared to native. Not to mention, it's being upscaled from 1080p to 4K, too.

If you don't happen to own the latest-and-greatest in Blackwell silicon, and you also don't want to pay for the Ultimate tier of GeForce Now (RTX 5080), there's still some good news for you. After initially locking DLSS 5 to only the RTX 50-series, Nvidia has confirmed it'll bring the 3D-guided neural rendering tech to RTX 40-series GPUs soon. "Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series," said Ben Berraondo, head of PR at the company.

It's likely that modders opening the floodgates for patched DLLs convinced, or perhaps forced, Nvidia to reconsider its initial stance. It's no secret that DLSS 5 has a merciless compute cost, so making it work on older Ada GPUs would only result in negative PR for an already divisive product. But once modders showed it's possible — not just on the 40-series, but also on the 30- and even 20-series — the ball was in Nvidia's court and, to its credit, the game hasn't stopped. It'll be interesting to see the performance, considering the RTX 40-series only has up to 2x MFG.

For now, the focus is entirely on optimizing DLSS 5 for RTX 50-series, and that improvement will, in turn, help the future release on RTX 40-series, too. As more and more games implement the tech, the dataset behind it will mature, and DLSS 5 might one day grow to distinguish itself from AI slop for its critics. At the moment, don't expect granular control like we've seen through ReShade, as that's entirely a community effort. DLSS 5 will simply be an on/off toggle in most titles since the devs would've already tweaked the individual parameters themselves.

Sales of discrete graphics processors for consumer PCs were up both sequentially and year-over-year in the second quarter despite soaring prices caused by component shortages, according to a newly released report by Jon Peddie Research. Although PC CPU shipments dropped in Q2 2026 year-over-year amid seasonality and shortages, sales of standalone graphics processors for consumer computers were up 12.2% sequentially and 14.1% YoY, the best market dynamics in some time.

Sales of graphics processing units for consumer PCs — which include integrated and standalone GPUs for desktops and laptops — totaled 75.5 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 10.4% quarter-over-quarter and 1.1% year-over-year, primarily driven by notebooks. This happened as the consumer CPU market contracted by 1.1% YoY amid a massive sequential drop in desktop CPU shipments and a significant rise in mobile CPUs shipments. Desktop GPU shipments declined by 4% quarter-over-quarter, while notebook GPU shipments surged by 16.8%, JPR claims.

But despite declining desktop PC unit shipments and modest growth in notebooks, unit shipments of discrete GPUs increased by 12.2% sequentially and 14.1% year-over-year in Q2 2026, according to JPR data. Jon Peddie Research does not publish absolute numbers of standalone graphics processors shipped in the second quarter, but our estimate is that around 20 million discrete GPUs were sold by AMD, Intel, and Nvidia in Q2, based on attach rates and Nvidia's market share and dynamics.

The results indicate that demand for PCs with discrete graphics remained remarkably resilient despite soaring component prices and slowing demand for desktop PCs. However, JPR's shipment data does not reveal whether the increase was primarily driven by gamers buying graphics cards, stronger demand for gaming notebooks, or other factors.

"The second quarter is typically down compared to the previous quarter," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "This quarter, discrete GPUs increased by 12.2%, even while a global memory crisis sent component prices soaring, driven by a mix of supply-side positioning, artificial demand shocks, and localized market dynamics."

Jon Peddie Research has yet to publish its complete desktop AIB report, which is expected later this month and will include market shares for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia; yet it is safe to say that the latter has maintained its undisputed leadership.

As for the overall consumer PC GPU market, Intel retained its leadership with a 56% market share as it increased shipments of consumer CPUs in Q2 2026. Nvidia came second with 23%, which is not bad at all considering that it only ships discrete GPUs. AMD came third with 21% share, up significantly from 14% in the same quarter a year ago, as it managed to gain seven percentage points of the consumer GPU market YoY amid growing sales of its consumer CPUs.