In a bizarre quality control issue, a gamer discovered protective film on the VRM thermal pads of their Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC graphics card. As per a Reddit post by u/buczi94, the GPU was purchased brand new and had never been disassembled or sent for any sort of repairs. After using the GPU for almost five years, the owner of the GPU started noticing high temperatures on the VRMs. They also faced frequent black screens during higher loads, waking the PC from sleep, and cold boots.

The Redditor claims that they upgraded their motherboard BIOS and GPU firmware and drivers, alongside disabling several settings including custom PBO curve, XMP, and Resizable Bar. Unfortunately, none of these measures helped alleviate the problems. They further performed some benchmark tests using Furmark and OCCT, where the GPU temperatures would reach as high as 80°C with the GPU hotspot at 105°C. While these numbers were not alarming, they also found that the cooling fans would randomly ramp up to their highest speed, despite setting a custom fan curve in MSI Afterburner and limiting the fans to 90%.

Fed up with the situation, the owner of the graphics card eventually took the decision to disassemble the GPU for cleaning and repasting, upon which they found protective films on the VRM thermal pads. They claim that peeling off the protective film and repasting the core resulted in a sizable reduction of 15°C on the GPU and 30°C on the GPU hotspot. Additionally, after three hours of stability tests on Furmark and OCCT, no errors were recorded.

The GPU owner also provided an update on the black-screen issues following the fix. While the problem initially occurred once every month or two, it became an everyday concern just a few days before the thermal pad films were discovered, specifically after waking the PC from sleep, during cold boots, or under heavy loads. After the fix, the owner claims that they experienced just one black screen during a cold boot, although they acknowledged that it was too early to determine whether the problem had been fully resolved.

Removing the protective film from the VRM thermal pads fixed the overheating problem. However, the damage caused by years of excessive heat cannot be undone. The owner alleged that since the VRMs were running much hotter for a long period, they have potentially affected several components on the graphics card, including the MOSFETs, as well as the capacitors around the VRM. The owner believes the excessive heat may have also caused the PCB to repeatedly expand and contract over the years, which can put stress on the board and potentially contribute to tiny cracks in solder joints. While they suspect this could be the reason behind the black screen issue, it is just a theory and can only be confirmed through proper testing.

As the flaw occurred at the production and assembly level, the GPU owner contacted Gigabyte’s support team to report the issue and asked for a replacement. However, instead of addressing the alleged manufacturing defect, Gigabyte’s support staff advised the owner to test their GPU in another system. They also informed the GPU owner that since the card was out of warranty, they should contact the retailer or pay a local repair shop to fix the issue.

It is unclear whether the protective film caused any damage to the VRMs, which ultimately resulted in the GPU's black-screen problems as claimed by the owner. However, the case raises questions about how a factory assembly error could go unnoticed for years and whether manufacturers should address such defects even after the standard warranty has expired.

ByteDance and Tencent have each taken delivery of roughly 10,000 Nvidia H200 accelerators in recent weeks, the Financial Times has reported, citing two people with knowledge of the matter, a development that would mark the first meaningful movement of the chips into mainland China since President Trump approved their export last December.

Beijing wants most of each company's U.S.-licensed allowance, which the FT puts at up to 100,000 units apiece, kept off the mainland, with regulators directing buyers toward Hong Kong instead. Nvidia is reportedly holding around 500,000 H200s built largely for Chinese customers. Trump cleared H200 exports to approved Chinese customers last December, in exchange for a 25% cut of every sale to the U.S. Treasury, and Washington had licensed roughly 10 firms, including Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, and JD.com, by May.

However, Beijing never let orders flow: every purchase requires case-by-case approval from the National Development and Reform Commission, and the resulting blockade left Jensen Huang telling investors that Nvidia's China market share had fallen from 95% to zero. As recently as mid-July, a U.S. trade official told a congressional hearing that only a very small quantity of chips had shipped against the licenses. Lenovo and other Nvidia partners told Chinese customers last week that they could resume orders for H200-based AI servers, per the FT, though each purchase still needs separate NDRC sign-off.

And just because chips are moving doesn’t mean the infrastructure is there to support them. The H200 draws up to 700W, with a fully loaded eight-GPU HGX H200 server pulling roughly 10 kW. At that rate, a single company's 100,000-unit allowance works out to about 12,500 servers and 125 MW of IT load, and Nvidia's reported 500,000-unit stockpile translates to roughly 625 MW.

Hong Kong's entire installed base runs to 47 data centers totaling about 581 MW, per Hong Kong Free Press, and the city's average PUE of 1.62 pushes actual grid draw well above the IT figure. "It's a dilemma," a person familiar with the situation told the FT, with companies unable to find anywhere in the territory to deploy the chips. The Northern Metropolis data center cluster meant to fix the shortfall, awarded to Range Intelligent Computing in March, isn't slated to come online until 2029.

Chinese labs increasingly run inference on domestic accelerators but are still thought to train frontier models on Nvidia hardware, and DeepSeek's failed attempts to train its R2 model on Huawei Ascend chips show why.

The 10,000-unit deliveries amount to roughly 2.5% of the 400,000-plus H200s that ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent were collectively approved to buy in January, but the NDRC still gates every order, and steering the bulk of licensed volumes to a territory that can't house them keeps the mainland market captive for domestic chipmakers.

Computer enthusiast 1usmus has developed a new update for their Hydra overclocking application that introduces VRAM overclocking and power limit control for some of the best graphics cards on the market, Nvidia's RTX 50-series. The new update, 2.3B, adds support for a maximum memory offset of +3000MHz for memory overclocking and a static power limit adjustment that peaks at 125% regardless of which RTX 50-series model is used.

The new update allows RTX 50-series graphics card owners to overclock their GPU’s GDDR7 memory up to 36 Gbps. 1usmus showed off their personal Asus ROG Astral LC RTX 5090 OC overclocked to 36 Gbps on the memory to confirm that the application works as advertised. Hydra’s aforementioned limits are reportedly aimed at this first release specifically to keep users safe. But 1usmus hinted that future iterations of the app could have higher limits, noting that the RTX Pro 6000 has experimental support for the “complete feature set” of the program.

Beyond VRAM and power limit adjustments, Hydra version 2.3B also features direct XBAR offset control and support for second-generation “Rail Offsets.” The voltage frequency curve has also been changed and is now unrestricted compared to prior versions.

Compared to mainstream overclocking tools, Hydra supports more in-depth overclocking features that are geared for extreme overclocking. This is particularly true of the XBAR offset control, which is a method of overclocking an Nvidia GPU’s interconnect, helping improve performance beyond just GPU core and memory overclocking, similar to overclocking the Infinity Fabric on AMD CPUs. For pure core and memory overclocking, Hydra’s latest update matches what existing overclocking tools can achieve, such as MSI Afterburner, for now.

For the uninitiated, Hydra is a tool 1usmus released several years ago to better tune Ryzen CPUs. Since then, the app has evolved from just being an advanced AMD overclocking utility to also featuring overclocking support for Nvidia GPUs, overclocking support for Radeon GPUs, DRAM overclocking, and memory stability testing.

Now that the best graphics cards are worth a fortune for both gamers and AI enthusiasts, modders have resorted to hacking Nvidia’s older Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) series, originally released five years ago, as a way to overcome the ongoing memory shortage and ludicrous prices. CMP Unlocker, a completely software-based solution, has restored the previously locked-away memory on the CMP 170HX, boosting its memory capacity by up to 8X — from just 8GB to a massive 64GB, and from 10GB to 40GB.

To truly understand how the hack works, you need to dissect the CMP 170HX. The CMP 170HX is the flagship SKU in Nvidia's CMP series and leverages the GA100 (Ampere) silicon. It is the same 7nm die that powers the more expensive A100 accelerator. Unlike other Nvidia silicon with separate soldered memory chips, the GA100 itself is a monolithic chip with on-package memory. That means the total amount of memory is physically present on all GA100 silicon, so it comes down to how many memory stacks are active.

The GA100 silicon features a total of six HBM2e memory stacks. Depending on the SKU Nvidia is aiming for, it could have five or six memory stacks enabled. The chipmaker carves the CMP 170HX from defective or binned GA100 silicon that did not meet the stringent quality requirements for the enterprise-grade A100. Nvidia officially sold the CMP 170HX in 8GB and 10GB variants. All the chipmaker did was disable the additional memory through firmware, along with other limitations, such as nerfing compute performance and PCIe interface speeds.

Nvidia's approach is somewhat reminiscent of the old AMD Phenom II and Athlon II days, where some models shipped with disabled cores that could sometimes be unlocked through BIOS tweaks. Similarly, the CMP 170HX 8GB and 10GB models can potentially be unlocked to access their full memory capacity of 64GB and 80GB, respectively, though only 40GB is confirmed to be working from user feedback. As detailed in "A Canary in the Crypto Mine: Defeating Stack Protection in a GPU Secure Coprocessor," Jon Pry's research paper provides the technical blueprint for bypassing Nvidia’s Falcon security microprocessor, which tools like CMP Unlocked are based on.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this exploit is that it is entirely software-based and requires no physical modifications to the CMP 170HX. It sounds like a joke, but you are literally downloading more memory for your graphics card. It’s important to note, however, that the amount of memory you can successfully unlock and maintain stability will vary. The issue is that there is no way to know whether the locked-away memory is fully functional because Nvidia did so for product segmentation, or whether the chipmaker deactivated it due to physical defects. It's a similar situation to another repurposed crypto device, AMD's BC-250, that we recently tested.

Beyond unlocking the hidden memory, the software exploit can also restore processing power to the CMP 170HX’s Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), which increases its computational performance. Another notable benefit is the upgrade to a faster PCIe interface speed. The CMP 170HX can now operate at PCIe 2.0 x4 speeds, a significant upgrade from its original restriction to PCIe 1.0 x4. There is still untapped performance, though. Nvidia implemented hard restrictions on the CMP 170HX’s connectivity by limiting the accelerator to just four PCIe lanes and physically omitting 12 capacitors from the PCB. If you solder the missing capacitors to the PCB, it could unlock full PCIe x16 bandwidth and enable the accelerator's maximum throughput, though we haven't seen that in action.

The CMP 170HX launched with a hefty price tag of $4,300 at the height of the cryptocurrency mining boom. Nowadays, they used to sell for around $250 on eBay. However, when word of the exploit got out, they immediately jumped to over $1,000, a 4X increase in market value. Nvidia’s A100, offered in 40GB and 80GB PCIe variants, starts at around $3,500 and $11,500, respectively. The CMP 170HX is attractive for AI users because it costs a fraction of the A100 but can offer the same memory capacity, though the silicon lottery is not always generous. Regardless, Nvidia’s Ampere architecture is now two generations old. Even with added memory capacity, it cannot match the raw computational performance or efficiency of Hopper or Blackwell.

The component crisis continues to wreak havoc across the computer industry, and its latest victim is Intel's top-tier workstation GPU, the Arc Pro B70. The Battlemage card launched with an MSRP of $949 earlier this year and has been regularly available for $1,000... up until now. The Arc Pro B70 has been hit with a 30% price increase in the States, a 26% increase in Europe, and a whopping 48% increase in Korea this month.

In the US, the ASRock Creator variant of the card is currently listed on Newegg and Amazon for $1,299. Price trackers confirm it was available for $999 just last month and received the hike at the beginning of August. Going from $999 to $1,299 constitutes a 30% increase practically overnight. Another retailer, B&H, actually has the Arc Pro B70 listed for an insane $1,779, but that's the reference design from Intel.

Beyond North America, Europe has seen a similar hike despite the GPU already being overpriced there. In Germany, the Arc Pro B70 has been available for roughly 1,200 Euros, or almost $1,400, across different vendors since June. Geizhals' price tracking now shows the average price of the card at around 1,500 Euros instead, which works out to $1,735. That's a 26% increase between the two recorded prices.

Moving to South Korea, the price hike is the most egregious with a 46% jump from late July to today — less than one month. Danawa, a price aggregator in the region shows the Arc Pro B70 cost 1,889,980 KRW, or $1,334, on 21 July. It rose from that to 2,798,980 KRW, or $1,975, by 16 August. This was less of a sudden hike since the graph below shows an incremental curve over the past few weeks, but it's still absurd. Intel's official pricing is actually listed even higher, at 2,817,000 KRW ($1,988), before discounts.

The Arc Pro B70 comes with 32GB of GDDR6 ECC VRAM, making it extremely desirable for AI workloads, in particular, inference. It also happens to be Intel's top-end Battlemage GPU since the company did not launch any gaming-focused flagship this generation. Any card performant in machine-learning tasks is worth its weight in gold today, as proven by constant, silent price hikes that don't seem to be stopping anytime soon.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is somewhat of a legend in the modding community when it comes to VRAM upgrades. The card's strange 11GB memory config lends itself very well to repair jobs that double its memory pool to 22GB. We've seen it happen in China and the UAE before, and now, a Japanese vendor offering the same services has been spotted. The shop charges 45,000 Yen, or $282, for adding 11GB of memory to your existing RTX 2080 Ti, which comes out to about $25 per gigabyte.

The shop has a very uninspired name that roughly translates to "AI to GPU Expert," since they take regular gaming cards and transform them into AI workhorses with a lot of VRAM. They operate out of Saitama Prefecture and have a store on Mercari where you can find a bunch of different modded GPUs listed for rather reasonable prices.

The cheapest pre-modded RTX 2080 Ti we could find was an MSI Venus 2X model for $428. Just a few days ago, we saw blower-style 22GB RTX 2080 Ti SKUs listed for $500 on eBay from a Hong Kong seller. It's hard to get your hands on memory for a fair price these days, but it seems like this vendor has a very generous plug based on their prices.

They even posted about recently receiving a large shipment of 2GB GDDR6 modules made by Samsung, all intended for upgrading RTX 2080 Ti cards. The batch included 200 modules, so 400GB of extra VRAM that should be enough to upgrade 36 different RTX 2080 Ti cards to 22GB. Just an hour later, they had already upgraded the first card:

Replying to a comment, the shop clarified it charges 45,000 Yen for this service, which works out to $282.48 — that's $25.68 per GB of extra VRAM, or $12.84 per GB for the entire 22GB pool. All things considered, not a bad price at all. You can very easily find stock RTX 2080 Ti cards for less than $250 on the secondhand market, so the total cost of a 22GB card would work out to a little over $500.

At that point, it's better to buy one of the pre-modded units, but if you already have a 2080 Ti and wanted a boost in AI performance, you have the option. The extra VRAM won't really help in games because the cut-down TU102 silicon inside the 2080 Ti is not powerful enough to benefit from 22GB of VRAM. Even in demanding, ray-traced titles, you won't saturate the memory pool, and the GPU itself will become the bottleneck.

Keep in mind that your memory bandwidth is still locked to 616 GB/s after the upgrade, so anything that relies on speed will not see a noticeable improvement. On the other hand, more memory will greatly help AI models in both the training and inference stages. An RTX 2080 Ti is almost as powerful as an RTX A4000 in these workloads, but that has less VRAM and costs more. But if money is no object, perhaps a 44GB RTX 2080 Ti is more enticing to you.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and necessity is the mother of invention. Such was the impetus behind events that transpired in an esports hotel in China where two thieves secretly swapped GPUs in their rented rooms, and no one found out until days later. They were only caught after management found signs of tampering with the PC case after they'd already checked out, which eventually led to their arrest.

Esports or gaming hotels are commonplace in some Asian countries. Think of them as fancy, isolated gaming zones where you can go and spend time with a nice PC right in your room. As such, these bandits deliberately picked rooms with expensive RTX 5080 and 5070 rigs that could offer the most return on the secondhand market. They would check into rooms posing as unassuming gamers, just like any other customer.

Once inside, they would open up the PC case, take out the high-end GPU, put a lower-end GPU like the RTX 3060 in there, and close the PC back up. Since the GPU variants matched, they looked similar enough from the outside that management would never suspect anything. The systems also ran just fine, and there were no complaints from later customers, so there was no reason to inspect them up close.

What gave these thieves away was an unexpected power outage on July 18. While they were in the middle of their nefarious activities, the lights went out, so they called the front desk to ask for a new room. After shifting, an electrician noticed pry marks on the PC cases in their old room. When management opened them up and saw two RTX 3060s instead of two RTX 5080s in there, they realized that they'd been robbed.

Just two days later, the local police caught the suspects in the Guangbutun computer district after tracing them through hotel registration details. Investigation revealed that they would book hotels with the best systems and loot their GPUs to sell for half their value for a quick return.

A new RTX 5080 will run you around $1,400 today while an RTX 3060 goes for roughly $400. That means the thieves sold a 5080 for around $700 — anyone would pounce on that deal. The suspects even admitted to already having pulled this off four different times before. The total loss reported from their GPU-swapping spree was 80,000 Yuan, or almost $12,000. That's a lot more than the last time we looked at esports-hoping bandits who stole $2,000 worth of RAM in a similar heist in Shihezi City last month, but about the same amount as the amateur burglary in Korea earlier this year.

Nvidia has once again silently raised the price of its RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell on its US Marketplace website to $16,000. The card was previously listed for $13,250, which itself was a price hike earlier this year since it actually launched at $8,565. Workstation GPUs of this caliber don't really have an MSRP since no one's buying them at retail, but we saw pre-orders for this GPU as low as $7,673 back in March 2025.

• RTX Pro 6000 at Newegg: $13,998 (Old Price)

That's when the card was first announced, and it went on sale a month later, in April 2025, where initial listings had it up for $8,435 for bulk orders and $8,565 for single-unit purchases. This means the June 2026 change from $8,435 to $13,250 was already a 57% price increase, and now, from $13,250 to $16,000, we're seeing a roughly 20% hike. In total, from March 2025 to August 2026, the RTX Pro 6000 became almost 90% more expensive.

If you count the pre-order prices that were momentarily below $8,000 — we're seeing this card sell for more than twice what it debuted at. Keep in mind that we're talking about the boxed Workstation Edition, which is basically like the Founder's Edition for these professional cards, because otherwise it's also available in a 300W Max-Q variant with a blower-style cooler, and a server edition with passive cooling for rack mounts.

These price hikes were not officially confirmed by Nvidia at any point during 2025 and 2026. With the ongoing component crisis continuing to worsen memory prices, these changes are not a surprise, especially when you consider the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell has 96GB of GDDR7 VRAM.

Still, a nearly $7,500 increase from March 2025 listings to now is a sizeable jump. For what it's worth, we found the same SKU listed on Newegg for $13,998, so $2,000 less than Nvidia's official store and basically the same price as before. Perhaps this listing will rise to $16,000 the moment current inventory runs out, and prices always vary between retailers. Case in point, B&H has the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell up for $15,499 right now.

CoreWeave signed a contract for Nvidia A100 GPUs that runs into 2029, nine years after the Ampere-based SKU debuted, CEO Mike Intrator disclosed on the company's second-quarter earnings call on Monday. The company reported $2.58 billion in quarterly revenue, up 112% year over year, and a $104 billion revenue backlog that excludes more than $25 billion in new commitments booked since July. In remarks made during the earnings call, Intrator said, “pricing for prior generation SKUs is at or above where it was years ago.”

Michael Burry accused hyperscalers in November of understating depreciation by $176 billion between 2026 and 2028 by stretching GPU useful-life assumptions to five or six years against a chip cadence that now delivers a new Nvidia architecture roughly every year. Concerns that accelerating GPU obsolescence could unravel AI financing predate his estimate, and an unnamed Google architect put datacenter GPU service life at one to three years back in 2024.

Intrator told CNBC at the time that a batch of H100s coming off an expired contract was immediately rebooked at 95% of the original price, and Nvidia CFO Colette Kress countered Burry directly, saying A100s sold six years ago still run at full utilization. The 2029 deal stretches that record further, putting contracted revenue on 2020 silicon beyond even the six-year depreciation schedules defended by hyperscalers.

An air-cooled Nvidia DGX A100 system draws 6.5kW at maximum load and fits comfortably in legacy data center halls designed for roughly 20kW per rack. Nvidia's current GB200 and GB300 NVL72 racks draw 120kW to 140kW and require direct-to-chip liquid cooling, roughly six times what those older facilities can feed and cool. Blackwell therefore can't move into the halls where Ampere is currently deployed without a rebuild of power delivery and cooling infrastructure.

That mismatch is helping to keep A100 fleets in service regardless of how gracefully or not silicon itself ages. The energized, air-cooled capacity holding them has no higher-value use, and renting nine-year-old GPUs is a better alternative to leaving it in the dark.

CoreWeave's contracted power grew to 3.7 GW in Q2 and stood at 4.2 GW as of Monday, against just 1.5 GW online, so customer commitments already cover nearly triple the capacity the company can deliver. CFO Nitin Agrawal added on the call that capacity coming up for renewal represents a very limited share of CoreWeave's fleet, with older-generation ASPs at or above levels from a year ago.

A Redditor has successfully connected a very powerful eGPU to the Steam Machine. Large_Customer_3840 briefly explains how they managed to add a potent AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT to Valve’s compact modern gaming desktop by fitting an M.2 to OCuLink adapter in the machine. That was cable-connected to an Aoostar EG01, which hosted the hulking triple-fan desktop graphics card. However, there remained some wrangling to do due to Steam Machine hardware limitations.

The idea outlined above sounds like a quick and simple hack to add a more powerful GPU to the Steam Machine, but there are a few limitations of the Valve hardware that need addressing. Firstly, this compact computer has just one M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe slot, which is used by the SSD that Valve supplies with the machine. Valve reckons folks can augment this storage using the microSD slot, just like Steam Deck gamers are accustomed to doing.

So, after fitting an OCuLink to M.2 adapter, Large_Customer_3840 had to find somewhere for the boot drive to live. The answer was simply to shove the boot drive into a USB-C to NVMe caddy and boot from that. Valve’s Steam Machine has a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) port on the back which supports DP-Alt and Power Delivery. This is the fastest USB port it has, so it was used for the operating system.

A second snag with the M.2 to OCuLink adapter setup here is that there will need to be a case mod done so the cable can be threaded through the rear of the chassis. Large_Customer_3840 hasn’t made such a mod yet, and they are happy to have the system running open for now.

But many eGPU solutions like this, using the Aoostar EG01 in this instance, are inherently messy anyway. This older Aoostar eGPU dock has no enclosure, making it little more than a platform with a PCIe slot and supporting circuitry to host a desktop GPU, exposed, on your desk. Moreover, the EG01 doesn’t have a built-in PSU, unlike some models, so you also have a typically ugly PC power supply in view, too.

Looking beyond the aesthetic mess, the Redditor was pleased that “When I turned it on the 9070xt became the primary monitor and worked straight away. There was no hassle no selecting of graphic adapters.” The extra shot of performance delivered by one of the best graphics cards for PCs in 2026 was also welcomed. Apparently the OCuLink-connected Radeon RX 9070 XT eGPU ran Crimson Desert at over 100 frames per second using the High preset. It would have been interesting to know how the Steam Machine’s built-in discrete GPU handled the game at the same settings… As the Steam Machine basically runs a GPU similar to the Radeon RX 7600 – you can see our extensive Graphics Card Hierarchy data to see the expected difference between the RX 7600 and RX 9070 XT in various gaming scenarios. Online testing for Crimson Desert at the High preset yields frame rates of around 50 FPS, making the eGPU addition a sizeable performance buff.

Many AMD mini PCs come with USB4 ports nowadays, so it is a shame that the Steam Machine’s USB connectivity plateaus at USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) via a single USB-C on the rear. USB4, or better, is a more convenient hot-pluggable eGPU port opening up lots of other docking options for compact system users. It may offer worse bandwidth than OCuLink, but most folks find it an acceptable compromise. I’ve used both and was slightly annoyed by both, vowing not to be tempted into the eGPU world again until mainstream USB4 v2/Thunderbolt 5 solutions have arrived at affordable levels.

News of regional price increases for Nvidia graphics cards has been rolling in over the past little while, and those hikes have now arrived in the United States. We nearly spit out our coffee this morning while checking Newegg prices for Blackwell products. After months of painful but still relatively reasonable e-tail prices versus skyrocketing RAM and SSD costs, popular Blackwell GPUs are now eye-wateringly expensive. And those increases appear to be rolling out across other e-tailers, too.

As part of our ongoing research for the best graphics cards, we track the prices of every e-tail listing we can find for consumer graphics cards and calculate the median price of those products. We specifically track this figure as we feel it represents the price of a given graphics card model that you're most likely to find in stock, not stripped-down models that might be produced in limited volume to hit an artificially low MSRP.

With that, the theoretically entry-level RTX 5060 is now $469.99 at the midpoint of current prices, which is now two rungs up the MSRP ladder compared to its $299.99 launch MSRP. Just a couple of months ago, 5060s were selling for a median $369.99, or just below the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB’s $379.99 launch MSRP. Now, the cheapest GDDR7 Blackwell card costs more than the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB’s $429.99 launch price.

RTX 5060 Ti 8GB cards used to be among the least marked-up Blackwell parts thanks to the fact that their performance and VRAM capacity was out of line with their high $379.99 launch MSRP, but they’re now headed up the escalator like their stablemates. The median 5060 Ti 8GB now costs $529.99, which is about 13-15% more expensive than a couple of months ago.

The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB now commands an astounding $799.99 median price, a jaw-dropping 38% more expensive than the $579.99 midpoint we last calculated. The 5060 Ti 16GB was already far too expensive to recommend for gaming at that price, and the new markup suggests that it’ll only be of interest to local AI explorers trying to get the most VRAM they can on a Blackwell card for under $1000. Pour one out for what used to be the best entry-level enthusiast GPU we recommended.

The RTX 5070 was another one of the last gaming holdouts near its MSRP thanks to strong competition from the RX 9070 16GB, but the midpoint of prices for 5070s has now leaped an incredible 29% over our last survey, to about $850-$900. Even comparing lows to lows, prices for the cheapest 5070s have jumped about 20%. That takes this card entirely out of the midrange running and positions it closer to the much faster RTX 5070 Ti, which also has 16GB of VRAM to play with.

The hikes appear to have hit the middle of the Blackwell lineup the hardest, as the midpoint of RTX 5070 Ti prices is the same as it was during our last check-in. RTX 5080s haven’t gotten substantially more expensive than they have been, either, as prices for those cards have always been highly elevated compared to their $999 MSRP. And the RTX 5050’s price has barely moved today, either, hovering near the $300 it’s maintained since around the beginning of the year.

These increases haven’t been matched by hikes on the AMD side—yet. Heavy emphasis on yet. We’re only seeing single-digit percentage increases in RDNA 4 card prices compared to our last survey, although Radeon RX 9000-series cards appear to be affected by the silicon supply crunch in other ways.

The assortment of available RX 9070 16GB cards is perhaps a bit smaller than it’s been in the past, while the cut-down RX 9070 GRE is available in abundance around its $549 MSRP, suggesting that card has taken over the true midrange role the plain 9070 could never quite manage at the same MSRP.

We felt that the GRE’s price was high at launch, but AMD likely has a better crystal ball for silicon supply chain trends than we do, as the GRE now offers incredible bang for the buck compared to the RTX 5070’s new sticker.

The RX 9060 XT 8GB isn’t completely dead yet, but only one XFX 8GB model remains readily available at e-tail for $399. The RX 9060 XT 16GB’s median price has slightly risen to $474.99, and the RX 9070 XT now sits 5% higher than our last check-in at a median of $799.99.

All told, these Blackwell price hikes are another body blow for a DIY PC component market that’s already reeling from sky-high RAM and NAND prices. Graphics cards had until recently been one of the less hiked-up component categories in a DIY PC’s bill of materials compared to the pre-AI times, but that period of relative solace is well and truly over if you want access to Nvidia’s hardware and software stack.

If you’re a PC gamer, there’s no good news here. We’ll have to see whether there’s a similar price spike waiting in the wings for Radeon cards in the coming days, or whether this is the sad, sorry new normal.

Nvidia is reportedly testing variations of its upcoming Rubin Ultra accelerator with less memory due to concerns it won't be able to source enough HBM. Some versions include just 192 GB of memory and use HBM4 instead of HBM4E, as originally announced, according to The Information. The report confirms an earlier comment from firm SemiAnalysis about a potential Rubin Ultra memory downgrade.

We first saw Rubin Ultra in the flesh earlier this year at GTC, where Nvidia showed off a compute tray housing four compute chiplets alongside 1 TB of HBM4E memory. The accelerator is part of Nvidia's Kyber NVL144 design, which is set to roll out in 2027. SemiAnaylsis reported that the rack was delayed to 2028. "Our roadmap is intact," said Nvidia to Tom's Hardware in response, though the company made no clarification on if the delay was real or not. We've reached out to Nvidia regarding this latest report.

According to The Information, Nvidia is testing versions of Rubin Ultra with 192 GB or 256 GB of memory, as well as versions that use fewer than the 16 announced memory stacks. Perhaps most importantly, Nvidia is reportedly testing with HBM4, not HBM4E as originally announced. Along with the traditional improvements we see in each new HBM generation, HBM4E is unique in that it offers a customizable base logic die. Last year, Micron announced a partnership with TSMC to manufacture the base die and allow customers to tweak the logic die based on their needs.

The complexity of HBM4E has reportedly caused a strain on supply, with memory manufacturers unable to keep pace with Rubin Ultra's rollout. At least three lower-memory designs have been tested by Nvidia, according to the report, though we don't have a full picture of details on those prototypes. The report claims testing with HBM4, as well as 192 GB and 256 GB configurations, though it makes no mention of the number of compute dies, nor the memory type for each tested capacity.

The number of dies is important. In June, reports circulated that Nvidia cancelled its quad-die Rubin Ultra design due to manufacturing complexities. Although Nvidia has yet to comment, reports at the time suggested Nvidia would move ahead with a dual-GPU Rubin Ultra. In such a case, less memory would make more sense. Even with a dual-die Rubin Ultra, the quoted capacities are lower than expected. Each base Rubin GPU currently ships with 288 GB of HBM4.

It's clear Nvidia is trying to get ahead with memory in a world where agreements have been signed multiple years into the future. Nvidia has several of its own agreements. In June, the company announced a partnership with SK hynix to develop next-generation memory technology, which includes HBM, but also LPDDR5X and DDR5. In July, Nvidia expanded that partnership with a $500 billion strategic relationship that includes a long-term memory supply agreement with SK.

Although Nvidia is considering lower-memory configurations, one Nvidia customer told The Information that per-GPU memory isn't a top concern, valuing the relationship with Nvidia over the long term.

Memory shortages are touching nearly every design currently on the market, though enterprise systems packing HBM are particularly vulnerable. Last week, Digitimes reported that Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have sold through their HBM capacity through 2027. Last month, SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung said 2027 will be the "worst year" for the memory shortage, with supply constraints lasting through 2030.

A very rare sight indeed; that's how I'd describe the price of the deal on AMD's Gigabyte Gaming Radeon RX 9070 GRE graphics card, on sale at Newegg for $499, a return to its lowest-ever price. It's a very grim time for hunting down PC component upgrades, so to see an actual deal on a GPU that takes it below its MSRP in today's climate is a bit of a shock. The MSRP on the RX 9070 GRE is $549, having only recently extended its availability outside of the Chinese market. To grab the $35 discount and hit the $499 deal price, you must provide your email address to Newegg by clicking the "Extra Discount Available" link.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The Radeon RX 9070 GRE is built on AMD’s RDNA 4 graphics architecture and uses the same Navi 48 GPU as the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. Initially released for the Chinese market, 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.

The RX 9070 GRE also cuts the available VRAM to just 12GB of GDDR6, but still sports bandwidth speeds of 18 Gbps on a 192-bit bus, producing 432 GB/s of memory bandwidth in gaming and applications.

It's also reasonably power efficient, using just 220W total power draw. Identical to the standard Radeon RX 9070 GPU.

In our benchmark testing, from our review of the Radeon RX 9070 GRE, we found that the card averages 120 FPS at 1080p and 86.6 FPS at 1440p across our 11-game raster-only test suite. Perfect for 1080p and 1440p gaming, the RX 9070 GRE has ample VRAM, but pushing ultra settings on 1440p may tax the 12GB quite quickly.

Taking a quick peek at our performance charts, you can see the GPU outperform the RX 9060 XT 16GB and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, and slip in closely behind Nvidia's RTX 5070.

In the current PC component market, this is a very rare opportunity to pick up a graphics card for well below its MSRP launch price. So if you're looking for a competent card for 1080p and 1440p gaming, then consider the Gigabyte Gaming RX 9070 GRE for $499.99.

The AI-driven memory apocalypse has made computer parts so expensive that the average buyer has stopped building PCs. Multiple research firms have already said that, but we’re now seeing it in action in the market. Uniko’s Hardware shared on X four crazy combos of RTX 5090 GPUs being sold on the Taiwanese e-commerce platform PChome24h.

Some of the GPUs that come with a lot of "freebies" include the Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090, Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 Master, MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC, and a Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box external graphics card. These items are priced in NTD, but we’ll list them below, including their retail prices in dollars (NTD 32.25 = USD $1 exchange rate) and the included items.

As we can see, even though GPU prices are quite inflated, many of them come with enough freebies that you can start building one high-end system and three to five entry-level gaming rigs. They’re still priced relatively high compared to Amazon or Newegg in the U.S., though, but we have to keep in mind that Taiwan is a different market, so there will likely be variations in prices plus VAT.

While this might be an amusing piece of trivia for some people, it’s actually evidence of a disturbing trend in the PC building industry. Multiple research firms have been saying that the market will contract by double digits this year, with the entry-level PC market being hit the hardest, and that it’s not expected to bounce back until 2029. These combos are just evidence of that, at least in Taiwan.

That’s because sellers often put slow-moving products in a combo to help get their inventory moving. Given the number of motherboards, entry-to-mid-range GPUs, and other components included in these combos, it’s safe to say that these items aren’t selling and retailers are doing all these crazy deals just to free up capital.

As the AI-driven memory crisis has pushed up the prices of memory and graphics cards, many have already paused or delayed their purchases and upgrades. Only those with deep pockets who can afford to spend thousands of dollars on parts and combos like these are still buying PC parts.

We tested gaming performance with both NVMe and SATA SSDs across 11 games to determine if upgrading to a faster drive is worth it. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been a staple of PC gaming for years, but their importance grew significantly with the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2020. Both consoles feature high-speed NVMe SSDs and storage architectures designed to fully leverage their capabilities, enabling faster asset streaming and reducing traditional storage bottlenecks.

As a result, game developers have increasingly developed their titles for SSDs, with many modern games now listing them as a minimum system requirement. But how exactly do games use SSDs during gameplay, and does upgrading to a faster SSD actually improve gaming performance? In this article, we'll examine SSD activity in modern games and determine whether higher storage speeds translate into a better gaming experience. Given the surge in SSD prices, will a slower drive deliver comparable gaming performance to high-end alternatives?

Load Times

Load Times

While this article focuses primarily on SSD activity and performance during gameplay, loading times remain one of the most significant advantages of solid-state storage. It's well known that games can take several minutes to load from an HDD, whereas modern SSDs typically reduce load times to just a few seconds.

The gap between SSDs is much smaller. In some titles, PCIe NVMe drives can load games several times faster than SATA SSDs, but in many cases, the difference is relatively small. Naturally, different generations of PCIe SSDs have even smaller differences, with flagship drives often delivering only marginal improvements to loading times despite their substantially higher sequential throughput.

Disk I/O Operations in Games

Disk I/O Operations in Games

Before examining the performance results, it's important to understand the types of disk I/O operations that games typically generate. Two key metrics are block size and queue depth. The block size of an I/O operation defines the size of the chunk of data a game will read at one time, while queue depth is the number of pending I/O requests that a storage device has queued at any one time.

During gameplay, the vast majority of storage activity consists of random read operations as game assets are streamed from storage into memory. Sequential reads are less common, and write activity is generally minimal.

Microsoft provides several storage optimization recommendations for developers in its DirectStorage documentation. Although these guidelines are intended for DirectStorage-enabled titles, many of the underlying principles apply to games in general, even if they do not use DirectStorage. Among Microsoft's recommendations are the use of block sizes of at least 32k and sufficiently high queue depths to maximize storage throughput.

Modern games typically employ 32k or 64k random I/O requests. However, despite Microsoft's recommendations, most games continue to operate at relatively low queue depths.

Performance Comparison

Performance Comparison

Now we will examine SSD activity and compare performance across different SSD generations. The games included in our testing were selected because they either exhibited higher storage bandwidth than usual, had greater peak or average SSD utilization, had support for DirectStorage, or because they are popular titles that many gamers would be interested in seeing analyzed from a storage-performance perspective.

To place as much stress as possible on each SSD, all testing was conducted with 16GB of system memory. Using a smaller memory capacity reduces the amount of game data that can be held in RAM, forcing games to rely more heavily on the SSD than they would in a 64GB configuration. It also better reflects the configurations found in many mainstream gaming PCs. That said, we observed little difference in SSD activity when comparing 16GB and 64GB memory configurations.

When interpreting the SSD activity data below, it is important to understand that 100% utilization does not necessarily mean an SSD is reaching its maximum rated bandwidth. For example, a PCIe 4.0 SSD reporting 100% utilization is unlikely to be delivering its full 7.5 GB/s of sequential read throughput. In gaming workloads, SSDs can become fully utilized while transferring data at significantly lower bandwidths.

This is because the speeds advertised by SSD manufacturers are based on sequential read performance, whereas games primarily rely on random reads. While random-read throughput can approach sequential-read speeds under certain conditions, doing so requires sufficiently large block sizes and high queue depths. Although modern games often use relatively large block sizes, they typically do not use the high queue depths needed to fully saturate an SSD's theoretical bandwidth.

We have also chosen not to test any traditional hard drive disks. There are many documented examples of modern games performing poorly, taking an unbearably long time to load, or having visual issues when installing the game on an HDD. There are some games where this may not be an issue, but we still do not recommend playing modern games on an HDD.

The testing was conducted in gameplay. No built-in benchmarks were used. We found that SSD activity increases with higher settings, so that is where we focused our testing. We set each game to its absolute maximum settings.

We used HWiNFO to measure SSD activity and set it to the lowest polling rate possible to capture activity accurately without incurring overhead.

Test system

• MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Vanguard SOC
• Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• 16GB G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 6000 MHz CL30
• Crucial T700 Gen5 SSD
• Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G Gen4 SSD
• Adata XPG SX8200 Pro Gen3 SSD
• Samsung 870 EVO SATA III SSD
• Asus ROG Strix B850-F Gaming WiFi
• Corsair Nautilus 360 RS AIO Cooler
• MSI MPG Ai1600TS PCIe 5 PSU
• HAGS enabled
• Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.8737)
• Nvidia driver 610.62

Forspoken

Forspoken

Forspoken was the first game to support DirectStorage on PC. DirectStorage is a feature that aims to allow games to make full use of high-speed storage devices while reducing the CPU overhead associated with making reads from disk.

Looking at the table below, you can see that it does exhibit a fairly high peak and average bandwidth. In fact, it’s the highest average bandwidth we have seen in any game we have tested. Average utilization is also quite high, and the game hits 100% SSD utilization frequently.

How does this translate to performance?

While there is no difference in performance between the PCIe NVMe SSDs, you can see that having a PCIe SSD can give you a large boost in the 1% lows compared to a SATA SSD. We see a 39% increase in 1% lows at 4K, a 51% increase at 1440p, and a 22% increase at 1080p.

The higher peak and average bandwidth used by the PCIe drives resulted in higher 1% lows in this game, which makes for a smoother gameplay experience.

Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 makes extensive use of modern rendering technologies, including path tracing, mesh shaders, and RTX Mega Geometry. In a recent interview, Remedy explained that the game operates with a fixed memory budget, continuously streaming the assets required for the current scene from the SSD while evicting assets that are no longer needed. This approach keeps memory usage under control despite the game's highly detailed textures and geometry, making Alan Wake 2 one of the most storage-intensive titles available today.

The SSD activity increases with resolution in this game. We see an average of over 200 MB/s on each drive at 4K, which is rare for a game. We also see a whopping 5.1 GB/s of peak bandwidth on a PCIe 5.0 SSD at 4K.

How does this impact performance?

Unlike Forspoken, we do not see any difference in performance here for any of the drives tested.

Although the faster SSDs reach higher peak bandwidth, these peaks are only brief bursts rather than sustained transfers. In other words, the game is not continuously streaming multiple gigabytes of data every second. Instead, it transfers smaller amounts of data over very short intervals, resulting in high instantaneous bandwidth readings. As a result, the average bandwidth is the more meaningful metric, and it remains relatively similar across all of the SSDs we tested.

The average utilization on the SATA SSD can reach over 80% at 4K, but it is not enough to degrade its performance in comparison to the PCIe drives.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

The disk bandwidth through this sequence is actually lower than the previous two games. This makes sense, as the game uses GPU decompression, which increases the effective bandwidth flowing through the PCIe bus beyond what CPU decompression would. However, this increase in effective bandwidth is not reflected in the data that is being read from disk.

When reading the performance charts below, it is important to note that PCIe SSDs reduce portal transition times by roughly 2-3 seconds compared to SATA SSDs. On SATA drives, Ratchet therefore spends more time within each portal sequence. As a result, average performance and 1% lows can generally be slightly higher on SATA SSDs, since there is less active rendering during these extended transition periods. However, there is one exception.

While the SATA SSD has an advantage at 1440p and 1080p due to the extended time spent inside of each portal, the 1% lows take a hit at 4K. The SATA drive does not handle the first portal transition in the sequence particularly well at 4K, and so the PCIe drives have about a 38% advantage in 1% lows.

This portal sequence is the most storage-intensive part of the game. In normal gameplay, the game uses significantly less bandwidth, and so there is no difference in performance at all between the SATA SSD and the PCIe SSDs.

Spider-Man 2

Spider-Man 2

Spider-Man 2 was the second game to use GPU decompression of assets on PC. This is the third DirectStorage title we have tested so far.

Since the game uses GPU decompression, the effective bandwidth after decompression will be considerably higher than what we see here, but none of the SSDs we tested are being stressed in this game.

Performance is virtually identical on all drives in this game.

Starfield

Starfield

Starfield is an open world game that constantly reads data from disk. It also frequently hits 100% disk utilization as you traverse the world.

In previous games, 100% SSD utilization was accompanied by much higher peak bandwidth. Here, the lower peak bandwidth suggests the game uses a very low queue depth for its read operations. As you move through the open world, it continuously streams data from the SSD in frequent, small transfers, keeping average bandwidth very low.

Once again, we see no improvement in performance going from the SATA SSD to any of the faster PCIe NVME SSDs.

DOOM: The Dark Ages

DOOM: The Dark Ages

DOOM: The Dark Ages was the first game to list an NVMe SSD as a requirement. Not only is it listed as such on the PC system requirements, but Bethesda has a support page that reiterates that installing the game on an NVMe SSD is required.

The developers at idSoftware mentioned that the game uses a proprietary ultra-fast continuous sector streaming tech that virtually eliminates load times between levels.

The drives we tested are hardly being stressed in DOOM: The Dark Ages.

Given the disk utilization figures, it comes as no surprise that all of the tested drives deliver identical gameplay performance.

Although this article focuses on in-game performance rather than loading times, we also found little difference in load times when using a SATA SSD. Loading screens were not noticeably longer, and we observed no visual artifacts or streaming issues while playing on the slower drive.

Based on our testing, it is unclear why Bethesda lists an NVMe SSD as a requirement. A SATA SSD provided an indistinguishable gameplay experience, with no measurable performance drawbacks or observable streaming issues.

Dead Space Remake

Dead Space Remake

Dead Space Remake made headlines when it launched with abhorrent performance and stuttering issues. But how much of that was due to streaming from slower storage? Does a faster SSD help performance?

Although average disk utilization and bandwidth are relatively low, the game frequently reaches 100% utilization. Yet even during these periods, peak bandwidth remains well below what PCIe SSDs can achieve under high-queue-depth random workloads. This indicates the game is issuing read requests at a very low queue depth, leaving much of the SSD's available performance untapped. Additionally, the difference in average bandwidth between the SSDs is minimal.

All drives provide the same performance. There is nothing to be gained from a faster SSD in this title.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077

We included Cyberpunk 2077 in our testing because the game features a large and seamless open world, and it is one of the most popular games ever released.

The average bandwidth is by far the lowest we have seen in the games tested so far. This is not entirely surprising. Although the game was released in the same year as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, development began well before those consoles were released. As a cross-generation title, it also needed to run on the previous generation of consoles, which relied on mechanical hard drives. As a result, the game's streaming system was designed to perform well on significantly slower storage devices.

There is no noticeable difference in performance across the drives tested.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered modernizes the look of the original game with improved visuals. Built on Unreal Engine 5, it utilizes Nanite virtualized geometry, Lumen global illumination, and virtual shadow maps. This is an open-world game, and our first UE5 title is tested in this article.

None of the SSDs we tested reached 100% peak utilization and average utilization is extremely low, too.

As is the case with most of the games we have tested, the SATA SSD holds its own and there is no difference in performance across all of the drives.

007 First Light

007 First Light

007 First Light is a recently released game that uses DirectStorage. In a recent interview, the developers at IO Interactive revealed that the real-time level streaming system in the Glacier engine was redesigned for 007 First Light. The new system uses dynamic loading and unloading to allow for seamless transitions between sequences.

It’s clear that this new streaming system does not place a heavy burden on storage devices.

Given the I/O activity in this game, it is not surprising to see that all SSDs we tested perform the same.

F1 25

F1 25

We included F1 25 because it exhibits higher peak bandwidth and utilization than most games. The game’s high-speed driving requires rapid streaming of trackside assets, as the environment changes quickly and the player covers large distances in very short periods of time.

The game exhibits higher peak and average bandwidth than many of the games we have tested, but it is still not enough to truly stress a SATA SSD.

Once more, all of the drives show identical performance.

What About the Visuals?

What About the Visuals?

Many readers may be wondering if playing on a SATA drive resulted in any visual anomalies, such as slower loading textures, additional pop-in, or other visual artifacts. We did not notice any such issues in the 11 games we tested. There are some games that exhibit pop-in, but that is consistent across all storage devices. All of the drives we used in our testing provided an identical visual experience.

The Verdict

The Verdict

Out of all the games tested, only two showed measurable performance differences between SATA and PCIe SSDs: Forspoken and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

In Forspoken, moving from a SATA SSD to any PCIe SSD – regardless of generation – resulted in a significant improvement in 1% lows.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart showed more nuanced results. During the portal sequences at 1440p and 1080p, average framerate and 1% lows were slightly higher on the SATA SSD, as slower loading increased the time spent inside the portals. Since the portals contain less on-screen complexity, framerates are naturally higher within them. However, at 4K resolution, PCIe SSDs delivered better 1% lows. Outside of the portal sequence in normal gameplay, there was no measurable performance difference between any of the drives.

Across all other titles, PCIe SSDs provided no meaningful performance advantage, and there were no observable differences between PCIe generations. In the vast majority of games tested, a SATA SSD delivers comparable performance.

MORE: Best SSDs

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Nvidia has a booth at the annual QuakeCon, which is happening from August 6 to 9 at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas, where the company is selling RTX 50-series GPUs at their original launch price. The company said in its blog post that several Founders Edition graphics cards are available at MSRP while supplies last, and that there will also be several prizes and freebies, including the GeForce Trading Cards Series 1.

“If you’re attending this year’s event between August 6th and 9th, head to the GeForce booth ASAP to get in on the action,” Nvidia said in its blog update. “And if you want a GPU upgrade, our team is bringing Verified Priority Access IRL to QuakeCon, enabling you to purchase Founders Edition GeForce RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070s at MSRP while supplies last.”

The firm officially announced the RTX 50-series in Las Vegas at CES 2025, with the RTX 5090 priced at $1,999, the RTX 5080 at $999, the RTX 5070 Ti at $749, and the RTX 5070 at $549. However, the supplies of these GPUs were limited — the 5090s and 5080s went out of stock on the same day that they arrived on store shelves. It took several months for the RTX 50-series to finally dip below MSRP, but this only lasted a few months as the memory shortage took hold and caused VRAM prices to skyrocket.

This means that the best graphics cards for gaming are quite expensive at the moment, with Tom’s Hardware’s GPU price tracker showing the best price for the RTX 5090 sitting at $4,381 — more than double the $1,999 MSRP that Nvidia set for the GPU. Even the RTX 5080, 5070 Ti, and 5070 aren’t immune to these price increases, with the most affordable options for the graphics cards sitting at $1,289 (29% over MSRP), $989 (32% over MSRP), and $629 (more than 14% over MSRP), respectively.

Unfortunately, this isn’t likely the worst that we will see when it comes to GPU pricing. There has been some disturbing news that prices for RTX 50-series GPUs jumped by 30% in South Korea as wafer costs from TSMC have increased, and GDDR7 modules push past $20. While this hasn’t reached the U.S. at the moment, there is fear that retailers in the country will follow suit soon.

Such is the state of the PC building industry that RTX 50-series GPUs at MSRP have now become a come-on to desperate gamers who just want to upgrade their gaming PCs for a reasonable price. Unfortunately, “Verified Priority Access IRL” is only available during the convention and only until supplies last — once there’s no more stock on site, you’d have no choice but to troll the interwebs for a deal or a secondhand unit if you refuse to pay for more than the MSRP. Alternatively, if you believe that you’ve got the skills, Nvidia is also hosting Quake III Arena RTX Remix and DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations challenges, where the best players will each receive an RTX 5070 Founders Edition GPU.

The AI boom means that no matrix math FLOPS are disposable, and that means older Nvidia GPUs with Tensor Cores are getting a new lease on life. Services are popping up that will outfit your RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB of VRAM, doubling its original memory pool and making it more useful for modern LLM and diffusion workloads. If you’re hard up for compute and you don't have an RTX 2080 Ti to modify, however, eBay has just the thing. A Hong Kong-based seller will send you a pre-modded 22GB 2080 Ti in exchange for $499.

The listing only promises that you'll receive a "Turbo," i.e., blower-style, RTX 2080 Ti with the 22GB mod. Don't get too picky about the particular brand of card you might receive, as the seller says: "The GPU brand could be Gigabyte, MSI, ASUS, Leadtek or others. It depends on what we have in hand."

The eBay listing photos show a Gigabyte blower-style card along with a large box of presumably modified cards ready to ship and a GPU-Z screenshot confirming the availability of 22528 MB of memory from a running card.

The seller only has 99.6% lifetime feedback on eBay, which is relatively low, but feedback for this specific listing shows that at least 38 happy buyers have received these cards and that they’re working as described.

Assuming you can count yourself as one of those happy buyers, a $500 22GB RTX 2080 Ti might be the best VRAM bang for your buck that you can find these days. That relatively large memory pool, combined with the RTX 2080 Ti's 616 GB/s of memory bandwidth and Tensor Cores, means that it's still useful for local LLM tasks, although its raw compute capacity and limited reduced-precision data type support compared to more modern products might make demanding diffusion workloads leisurely.

Among Turing cards, the 24GB Titan RTX still commands about $800 on eBay at today's prices, and a Quadro RTX 6000 with the same amount of VRAM is about $900. The local AI enthusiast's favorite RTX 3090, which has 24GB of faster GDDR6X offering 936 GB/s of memory bandwidth, looks to be selling for about $1200. Ampere RTX Pro cards with even more VRAM rapidly get more expensive from there.

The fact that all of these GPUs are still commanding such high prices many years after their introduction is a testament to the continuing utility and universal availability of Nvidia’s Tensor Core architecture across both consumer and data center products since 2018.

AMD has had matrix math accelerators in its IP arsenal since CDNA 1 in 2020, but their availability has been limited to Instinct data center products until RDNA 4 arrived early last year. Intel included XMX matrix engines in the Alchemist architecture from the start in late 2022, but Arc graphics products have faced considerable challenges beyond the presence or absence of that capability. And Apple only just introduced Neural Accelerators to its GPUs with the M5 family.

All that means that if you’re hard up for VRAM capacity and still need a decent amount of compute to go with it, a 22GB RTX 2080 Ti could be a compelling and relatively budget-friendly way to get there, and you get access to the entirety of the CUDA software ecosystem in the bargain. Not bad for an eight-year-old GPU that might have previously ended up in the e-waste bin by now.

Many owners of high-end NVIDIA graphics cards live in fear of the high-density 12+4-pin connector that supplies power to their video hardware, as the connector has been shown to have dubious reliability versus the previous-generation PCI Express peripheral power connectors, largely due to an extremely minimal safety margin. A user on Reddit has decided that existing measures to protect his card weren't sufficient, and has now vibe-coded himself up a free tool that shuts the whole PC down if per-pin power draw is too high for too long.

The tool is ironically called "12VHPWR Guard" despite the fact that none of the graphics cards it supports actually have a 12VHPWR connector. The two cards primarily supported are the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 5090, both of which come with the updated 12V-2x6 connector. The modified plug is an attempt to mitigate the melting issue by slightly adjusting the dimensions, forcing users to make sure it is fully inserted into the card. However, the main power delivery wires and their contact points remain the same, and so the burning issue continues.

The reason the developer says that the tool only supports these two cards is that the ROG Astral GPUs have dedicated per-pin current sensors, although, despite what the author says on Reddit, ASUS' ROG Matrix RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 also have these sensors, and the author lists at least the Matrix RTX 5090 as supported on GitHub. The author also notes that ASUS' GPU Tweak III software can throw a warning when power draw goes too high, but that the warning "does nothing" if he's in-game or AFK, despite the fact that the app does support an audible warning.

In any case, the app by Humza Khalid and Claude AI is a very simple and fully free app that requires 35MB of RAM and a minuscule amount of CPU time to poll the I2C bus on the card for the current values twice per second. You can mouse over the system tray icon to see the current maximum power draw for any of the six +12V pins on the power connector. The pins are rated for about 9 amperes of current, and ASUS' own warning threshold is 9.2A, but Khalid has configured his tool such that it looks for current draw over 9.5A over a period of 15 seconds. If that period is exceeded, the tool abruptly shuts the system down, force-closing blocking apps.

The current threshold and the required duration are both configurable, so if you want more lenient or more vigilant settings, you can set them that way. It's surprisingly full-featured; it supports HWiNFO-based shared memory monitoring if the app is unable to access I2C for whatever reason, and it also supports both toast notifications and Windows Event Viewer logging. It's also apparently smart enough to detect sensor loss and avoid reporting all is well when it doesn't actually know, which is reassuring.

Given the extreme cost of these GPUs (which are among the best graphics cards, to be fair), it's easy to see why owners would resort to these measures. The cheapest of them, the ROG Astral OC GeForce RTX 5080, is currently starting at about $1810 USD. While there have been attempts to blame user error (and indeed some cases certainly were user error with the 12VHPWR connector), it has been thoroughly proven that this connector can fail through no fault of the user. While these failures aren't really commonplace, the fact that they happen does speak to the razor-thin safety margin built into the connector.

If you have one of the supported graphics cards, you can head over to Khalid's GitHub page to grab the tiny application. Only Windows 10 and 11 are supported for now, and you'll also need Python 3.10 or higher, which is why such a simple application requires 35MB of RAM. Just remember that the app isn't a replacement for making sure your graphics card, including its 12V-2x6 connector, is installed correctly.

Nvidia has reportedly begun to cancel orders for RTX 5090 graphics cards that were placed prior to raising their price, according to a Redditor’s own report. The claim, made in the Asus ROG subreddit, suggests that an order for an Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 BTF graphics card was cancelled and a refund issued.

The purchaser, who made their order through Nvidia’s marketplace, was reportedly given the choice to pay the “new price” for the GPU or to lose out. Meanwhile, contact with Nvidia’s customer support team, shared in a later post, placed the blame at Asus’ door instead, suggesting that it’s actually Asus’ fault for failing to notify them of the GPU’s new pricing.

IndependentOk1031 shared their story on Reddit over the last two days. In their original post, the Redditor explains that the order was for Asus to fulfil, even at the “stupid high” price of $4,429 (or $4,607 after taxes), but it was later cancelled. An updated post shared since then goes on to explain that, after reaching out to customer support, an Nvidia customer care agent suggested that Asus wasn’t happy to fulfil the order at the price that it was listed for at the point of order, which the Redditor suggests was Friday, July 31.

According to Nvidia, that’s because the “price change update” was provided a “little late,” resulting in the cancellation. Nvidia suggests that it did try to get Asus to honor the order but, according to its agent, Asus was “unable to fulfil it at the previous price rate.” As a result, Nvidia wasn’t able to make any further steps forward. The same GPU is now listed on Nvidia’s website for $4,929.99 before tax, an increase of $500 (or 11.28%). The Redditor is still waiting on contact from an Asus supervisor to discuss the situation but notes that “the odds of anything happening are slim.”

This follows reports last week of Nvidia price rises at major tech retailers in the United States, including at Best Buy and Amazon. While the RTX 5090 Founders Edition continues to hold an MSRP of $1,999, a price still listed prominently on Nvidia’s website, pricing for this top-spec GPU means consumers have to pay thousands of dollars more. Third-party pricing data from CamelCamelCamel shows that the lowest ever pricing for this high-end Asus ROG card on Amazon to date has been $3,289.09, with current pricing set at $4,849.99 from a seller.

As our GPU price index shows, this phenomenon isn’t restricted to the RTX 5090. Current and last-gen Nvidia and AMD graphics cards across the board have all seen significant price rises in a market being badly affected by the AI boom. The cost of memory has pushed the manufacturing costs up, while the demand for the cards themselves caused by AI has caused the retail price to soar further.

With no location mentioned, it’s unclear if the Redditor has any other remedies to pursue his case further. Either way, a near-$600 price hike for a GPU already costing over two times its MSRP demonstrates the significant strain facing buyers globally in the current PC hardware market. With no sign that the market is likely to cool any time soon, buyers looking for the best GPU on sale right now could see further price hikes in the months ahead.

As if the graphics card market was not already in a bad state, things are about to get even worse for consumers. The prices for the best graphics cards seems likely to continue to rise, as news of a 20% to 40% increase is now coming out of Japan.

CFD Sales Inc., a well-known Japanese technology supplier and distributor, has confirmed these price adjustments for Gigabyte graphics cards. However, given the current times that we live in, the price hikes will likely expand to other brands and make their way to the U.S. market sooner or later.

The revision notice about the Gigabyte graphics card price increases from CFD Sales Inc. reads:

"Thank you for your continued support. This is Ogaki from CFD. Thank you for your continued use of CFD-BIZ.com.

Due to a price revision by the manufacturer, we will be implementing a price revision (increase) for GIGABYTE VGA products, effective for orders placed from August 1, 2026.

The affected products will vary, but we anticipate price revisions of approximately 120% to 140% [editor's note: likely 1.2x or 1.4x] compared to current prices.

We sincerely apologize for this sudden announcement, and we appreciate your understanding."

There were already early signs that another significant price hike was looming on the horizon. Over the past several weeks, graphics card prices have climbed sharply across Asia in countries like China and South Korea. AI is still gobbling up all the supply for memory chips, and chipmakers are struggling to keep up with that demand.

The unprecedented demand for and shift toward AI hardware has substantially impacted the production cost of mainstream graphics cards, and as always, the repercussions pass down to the consumer.

One U.S. retailer confirmed to Tom's Hardware that it has not received any notice about price adjustments for graphics cards. However, it has heard news from Taiwan about Nvidia increasing prices on graphics cards, which is likely the source of the reported increases.

Prices for Blackwell and RDNA 4 graphics cards have usually been higher than MSRP to some degree since their launches, outside of discounts during sales events, but this year's increases have taken prices for those products up a virtual rung on the performance ladder. For example, the $299 RTX 5060 now sells for closer to the $379 MSRP of the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB at US retail. Further increases would make these products even poorer value relative to their long-gone launch MSRPs.

Popular models like the GeForce RTX 5070 and the Radeon RX 9070 are currently retailing for 15% and 18% over their original MSRP, respectively. These graphics cards once offered great value for their performance. If the expected round of price hikes comes to pass, we could soon see these cards approaching the $900 mark. That's wild considering just a couple of years ago, that same amount of money was enough to build an entire gaming system from scratch.

It may be too soon to panic, but price hikes in other regions indicate that graphics card pricing is going to worsen in the U.S. market. The only question that remains is by how much. To get a clearer picture, we have reached out to Gigabyte to find out what the manufacturer’s plan is for the U.S. market, and if the company anticipates any changes. In addition, we have also contacted several major U.S. retailers to see if they have received any advance notice from suppliers or distributors about potential graphics card price hikes, and we'll update this article if we hear back.

GPU prices are set to increase in South Korea starting this month, specifically Nvidia’s desktop GeForce RTX 50 series. According to a recent report, the price increase is primarily due to the recent increase in price for advanced process wafers from TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), along with the rising price for GDDR7 memory. Perhaps most troubling is that, due to global market dynamics, pricing doesn't exist in a vacuum for any single region, suggesting that price hikes could be in store for other areas in the future.

For context, TSMC recently asked its customers to prepare for price increases across its advanced chipmaking portfolio. This hike was extended beyond the newer 3nm process to include 7nm and other legacy products. ZDnet Korea’s report additionally cites market research firm TrendForce, claiming that GDDR7 2GB modules used in the RTX 50 series GPUs have increased to $20 per unit. As fabrication and memory costs have increased, Nvidia has raised the prices of the RTX 50 series GPU packages it sells to board partners. These board partners, thus, have little choice but to pass those higher costs on to consumers.

Multiple officials from domestic importers and distributors in the region have reportedly confirmed the price rise and have announced that major graphics card manufacturers plan to raise the prices of RTX 50 series models by up to 30% starting this month.

According to a manufacturing company official, "Major manufacturers have temporarily suspended shipments ahead of the August price hike, and to my knowledge, few companies have secured inventory prior to the price increase." Similarly, a local distributor said, "One manufacturer with a low domestic market share is considering a price increase of about 20% compared to existing levels, and other manufacturers are also preparing for price increases of up to around 30%."

High-end graphics cards with larger GDDR7 memory configurations are expected to see the biggest increase in production costs, leading to higher retail prices. According to Danawa, a South Korean price comparison website, the cheapest RTX 5060 Ti 8GB model now sells for around 700,000 won (about $490), up roughly 100,000 won (about $70). Meanwhile, the lowest-priced RTX 5070 model is listed at around 1.1 million won (about $770), an increase of approximately 200,000 won (about $140).

The flagship RTX 5090 has seen the biggest price hike. Depending on the model and manufacturer, it is currently selling for up to 7.3 million won (around $5,112), an increase of as much as 1.5 million won (around $1,050) compared to last month.

As memory supplies get tighter and tighter and graphics card prices continue to rise, things are getting weirder and weirder in the discrete GPU market. The latest sign of the times is AMD's launch of the RX 9050 4GB, an OEM-only and region-specific variant of the already limited-release RX 9050 8GB. If 4GB GPUs are coming back, we wanted to see how much gamers should expect to suffer by attempting to play the latest games on graphics cards with such small memory pools.

For reference, the last time AMD launched a new 4GB product was all the way back in 2022 with the RX 6500 XT and the RX 6400. And at least for discrete GPUs, Nvidia got off the 4GB train years earlier, after the launch of the GTX 1650 Super back in 2019. At a minimum, most every discrete GPU since has had 6GB or 8GB of VRAM.

AMD says the existing RX 9050 8GB is meant for 1080p medium gameplay with no further details about settings or upscaling, so the bar is already low for that product before the 9050 4GB cuts both bus width and memory bandwidth in half. Despite its cutting-edge RDNA 4 GPU architecture, the 9050 4GB has a meager 64-bit memory bus and a mere 144 GB/s of memory bandwidth, specs that would have been low-end even 10 years ago.

But the RX 9050 brings support for FSR 4 to even this lowest rung of the discrete graphics ladder, and its more advanced machine-learning-powered upscaling model should deliver a massive leap in image quality compared to the temporal approach of FSR 3 and earlier generations. Upscaling is likely going to be key to achieving playable performance in all but the most lightweight games on 4GB graphics cards.

So, is it totally insane for AMD to release a 4GB graphics card in 2026? Does that tiny VRAM pool make a graphics card useless for gaming? We don't have an RX 9050 4GB at hand, but we do happen to have both an RX 6500 XT and a GTX 1650 Super in the TH GPU library, so we fired up a few popular titles on these cards to see what kind of experience gamers can expect if they’re stuck with just 4GB.

To track GPU memory usage, we used HWiNFO64 and logged both its “GPU D3D Dedicated” and “GPU D3D Dynamic” parameters. If a GPU reports a large dynamic memory allocation, it’s a good sign of spilling out of VRAM, but that’s not an immediate sign that performance is going to fall off a cliff. Different games handle this kind of spillover in different ways, so it’s worth knowing about but not necessarily cause for alarm.

Fortnite

We started our testing with Fortnite, which needs no introduction as one of the most popular PC games out there. While it may have a reputation as a potato game, it can just as easily showcase the most advanced features of Unreal Engine 5.

Fortnite recently started using hardware RT acceleration to enable UE5's flagship Lumen effects, so the RT-Core-less GTX 1650 simply can't run the game with the visual richness we've taken for granted on most every other graphics card we've tested this year.

As a fully DirectX 12 Ultimate-compatible graphics card with RT support, the RX 6500 XT would seem to have an advantage here. And you can certainly run the game with Lumen enabled at medium settings and with XeSS Quality upscaling on the RX 6500 XT despite reported memory usage totaling well over 4GB.

But even though those delivered frame rates might seem acceptable, input latency is not, even with Radeon Anti-Lag enabled. Nvidia’s FrameView utility estimates input latency of 63.9 ms with Lumen on, and that’s too much for a competitive shooter like this. To get input latency down, you have to disable Lumen, and since that makes for an apples-to-apples comparison anyway, that’s how we continued our testing.

Between medium settings and XeSS Quality upscaling, Fortnite ends up being perfectly playable, and reported VRAM usage on both cards hovers just over the 4GB mark.

We have to wonder whether the RX 9050 might be able to run Fortnite with Lumen enabled while delivering lower input latency thanks to its more powerful RT accelerators and more modern architecture generally.

Apex Legends

Apex Legends struggled on both the GTX 1650 and RX 6500 XT out of the gate with our usual maxed-out test settings. Dropping back to High reduced the VRAM footprint and resulted in playable frame rates.

Apex doesn’t have any kind of upscaling support, so you’re entirely dependent on its quality settings to boost performance. But we were happy to see that we didn’t have to dial them back much to achieve playability on these cards.

Cyberpunk 2077

We also called up Cyberpunk 2077 as an example of a triple-A title that gamers with entry-level PCs might want to run in 2026. We chose 1080p medium settings out of the gate for this game and immediately enabled XeSS 2.0 Balanced upscaling, as even with that dialed-back preset, VRAM usage was already well over 4GB for both cards.

But even with that massive indicated VRAM spillover, Cyberpunk’s performance remained perfectly playable, if not entirely smooth. The crowd density setting had the biggest effect on the immersiveness of the gameplay experience compared to our usual maxed-out test settings. With low crowd density, the sprawling streets of Night City are practically empty. Cranking it back up to High restored the bustle that makes it feel like a lived-in world without totally devastating performance.

Counter-Strike 2

Counter-Strike 2 showed the greatest divergence between cards for memory allocation, at least according to the tools we have available. The GTX 1650 reported a total of 3.5 GB of memory used, and the RX 6500 XT showed 4.6 GB.

But that apparent spillover once again doesn’t equal poor performance, as the Radeon handily beats out the 1650 Super here.

Bottom line

Across the handful of titles we tested, gaming with just 4GB of VRAM isn't the instant performance cliff you might expect in 2026, but it also requires careful finessing of quality and upscaling settings to achieve not just playable performance, but also tolerable input latency. Once you’ve done that, though, it’s possible to have a perfectly fun time on hardware that would make most people turn up their noses at first glance.

Judging by our experience with the RX 6500 XT and GTX 1650 Super, upscaling will be key for the best experience with the RX 9050 4GB, and its support for FSR 4 will be a huge image quality improvement for low-end PCs.

The 9050 also brings much higher RT performance to the table compared to RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 products, and if games as widely played as Fortnite are finally starting to lean on RT acceleration to enable their most advanced lighting effects, that’s another useful technical upgrade for enabling the best experience, even on low-end products.

We’re sure that some modern AAA games would be truly unplayable on these 4GB cards, but that’s not the reason they exist. For low-end PCs that are built to run the most popular esports and free-to-play titles, 4GB is still fine, and for markets outside of the United States, especially, products like this are important—just not to enthusiast PC builders.

In that light, the just-released RX 9050 4GB and the higher-end 8GB version are best understood as a much-needed technical update for entry-level OEM systems, much like how we described the RTX 5050 when we reviewed that card last year. If you have the luxury of spending more on a graphics card, you certainly should, but for those renting time in internet cafes and esports centers outside of the USA, low-cost products like the 9050 are an important bridge to the wider world of PC gaming.

We all know the current state of pricing for PC components is through the roof. Looking back, we have the hindsight to see what the prices were a year or two ago, and be thankful that we bought something when it was cheaper or on a really good sale. But for those who didn’t upgrade back then, what does the future look like if you want to upgrade your graphics card?

Currently, we have access to the 50-series range of graphics cards from Nvidia, and the 90-series from AMD, with a couple of entries from Intel. These cards were primarily released in January 2025, with different graphics card SKUs released throughout the year. We’re now more than halfway through 2026, with the rumored release of the next generation of graphics cards not arriving until late 2027, or even 2028, so we’re looking at at least a year before we see any hint of a new GPU release.

Why the delay or extended release cadence? Well, the simple answer is the costs. Just one aspect of the increased costs incurred with any new graphics card release will be the high-speed memory used, and, in the GPU's case, the amount of VRAM. Prices have become exponentially more expensive due to the AI crunch, so adding more memory to a GPU is going to not only increase the production costs of any new graphics card direct from Nvidia or AMD, but also boost the expenses that AIB board partners have to incur to offer the partner GPUs. These manufacturing cost rises will, of course, be passed on to us poor consumers. There might even be reductions in the amount of onboard VRAM for different card SKUs; we will have to wait to find out.

There are no stock issues with picking up a new GPU; the main issue is just the cost. I keep track of all the current graphics card prices twice weekly in our GPU Price Index, and have seen the prices creep up steadily since release, especially with the higher-end and more popular GPUs, or those deemed the best performance per dollar.

Here are two tables that show the initial MSRP launch prices of Nvidia’s 50-series and AMD’s 90-series graphics cards, along with the current price and the lowest prices that we’ve seen for each card. This generation of cards was released with a higher MSRP, and many GPUs released were well above the announced MSRP prices set by Nvidia and AMD, garnering a lot of criticism from both the press and consumers. What’s also been highly noticeable this generation is the lack of notable below-MSRP discounts in major sales events such as Black Friday or Prime Day.

We can see that, in general, the lowest-ever prices seen are barely below the launch MSRP prices, if at all. With cards such as Nvidia’s flagship GeForce RTX 5090 never dropping below its initial release price. In the case of the RTX 5090, the price of the top-tier GPU that features 32GB of precious VRAM has only ever increased, rising from $1,999 to $4,288, a staggering $2,289 (114.5%) difference.

As I see the cheapest models sell out while I’m checking on the weekly prices, the cost of the GPU just keeps climbing a little higher every time. Although the RTX 5090 is the most extreme example of GPU inflation, it is unfortunately not alone.

AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT, which many feel to be the value champion for high-end GPUs, competes against Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti, but for several hundred dollars less. Up until very recently, the 9070 XT held a steady $699 retail price, but as of writing, the price has jumped to $719, a $120 hike from the $599 launch MSRP price, a 20% increase.

To help in your decision of what card you want to buy, consider what features the card offers and what you will make use of. Is ray-tracing important to you? Does frame gen technology interest you? Are the video encoders and codecs for streaming or video capture better for your associated software? Do your research; don’t just look at graphs with FPS numbers. Think about what is going to give you the most overall benefit.

Other things to also consider are the differences in the supporting software, such as FSR and DLSS, with Nvidia slightly ahead for the most part for the latest technology, but with the caveat that they are also more expensive. AMD cards this generation have offered more VRAM on lower-end GPU SKUs, which can be an important feature for gamers playing on higher-resolution monitors with game settings dialed up.

If you want a graphics card now, you don’t have much choice but to grab what you can at the lowest price that’s available to you at the moment. Holding out for the next generation of GPUs often isn’t going to save you any money; as with all technology, obsolescence is a fact of life.

We have to wait for the definitive specifications to be announced for the new GPU lineups, and until then, everything is educated guesswork and speculation. Whether reductions in onboard VRAM allocations take place, GPU die size shrinks, or core counts multiply, all wait to be seen. Whatever happens, though, one thing is guaranteed, and that is that the new lineup will be more expensive than this generation; we just don’t know yet by how much.

Finding a massive discount on a graphics card in the current economic climate is going to be limited to stores making pricing mistakes or some serious combo bundle deals from retailers. Seeing how even the Nvidia 40-series and AMD 70-series GPUs have held value and not greatly depreciated is an indication that the current generation of cards is not going to see massive discounts closer to the launch of the next generation. We hold out hope that we may see some discounts in the next Black Friday sales, but I wouldn’t count on seeing anything truly jaw-dropping, although I do hope to be proven wrong.

We wrote about the world’s tiniest GPU heading to production last November. Its developer, Pongsagon Vichit, has now received the finished silicon back from the Tiny Tapeout community, where it was part of the SKY 25b shuttle. “ASIC TinyGPU v2.0 is alive and working!!!” cheered the amateur ASIC/FPGA designer on social media. That’s definitely worth celebrating, and we are also happy to hear that TinyGPU v3.0 will arrive towards the end of this year.

Above you can see the TinyGPU v2.0 SKY 25d “standalone GPU” silicon in action. At the beginning of the embedded video, Vichit has a rather low-polygon model on screen that is being manipulated by a game controller in real time. The second demo, showing a colorful zooming and rotating globe representing the Earth, is more impressive.

According to the TinyGPU v2.0 GitHub, this GPU can perform transformation & lighting plus rasterization with a maximum of 1,000 triangles on screen. It also features one dynamic directional light, flat shading, backface culling, and affine texture mapping. This finished sliver of silicon, packing around 240,000 transistors, also offers a 4-bit double buffer and an 8-bit depth buffer stored on QSPI RAM, according to its designer.

In our earlier reporting, we noted that TinyGPU v2.0 was tested using a Basys3 FPGA host. This test only managed frame rates in the demo of between 7.5 and 15 FPS. The Tiny Tapeout silicon won’t run any faster than the FPGA, Vichit previously indicated, and indeed, the on-screen action doesn’t look any more fluid.

TinyGPU v3.0 ASIC details and delivery schedule

No sooner has TinyGPU v2.0 materialized than the excitement over TinyGPU v3.0 begins to build. The next-gen TinyGPU had already been submitted to Tiny Tapeout’s upcoming run before TinyGPU v2.0 was actually received and tested by Vichit. “But we all know that GPU is a cut-throat business — must release new models fast,” joked the enthusiast.

New and significant in TinyGPU v3.0 is the programmable pixel shader. In other social media posts about this upcoming GPU, Vichit reveals that it will boast the following pixel shader specs:

• Lightweight DirectX 8 PS 1.1–inspired design
• SIMD (4 pixels in parallel)
• 31 instructions per shader (tweaking)
• 26-op instruction set
• Branching via masked execution
• 4x 8-bit temp registers

With the new pixel shader in parallel with Z-buffer access, and near/far plane culling plus guard band clipping, big fidelity gains are teased. A far more detailed, textured, and animated model should be the result with little to no performance impact.

One of the earliest TinyGPU v3 demos featured a chameleon to pay tribute to the Nvidia GeForce 3, reputed to be the first programmable shader GPU for consumers. That milestone was achieved in a PC graphics card that launched a quarter of a century ago (Feb 2001).

The latest information about TinyGPU v3 mentions that the finished ASIC should be delivered in December 2026 or January 2027.

Few names echo in the aisles of tech cathedrals like the legendary GTX 1080 Ti, released by Nvidia all the way back in 2017. The GPU it's based on, GP102, actually debuted a year earlier, in 2016, which is why this story is titled as a decade-old hindsight. German outlet PC Games Hardware just retested all three cards based on the GP102, pitting them against far more efficient modern offerings to answer a simple question: how well does the 1080 Ti hold up in 2026?

At its launch, the GTX 1080 Ti cost $700 and used a cut-down version of the GP102 called "GP102-400," while the Titan Xp that released a month later enjoyed the full-fat GP102-450 silicon. Built on the Pascal architecture, the 1080 Ti featured 3,584 CUDA cores that could boost up to 1.58 GHz, 11GB of GDDR5X memory saturated across a 352-bit wide bus, and a 250W TDP. It was the last (consumer) flagship Nvidia made with pure rasterization in mind.

Jumping to the results, we see the 1080 Ti still pushes close to 60 FPS in modern titles at 1080p resolution. However, it's slower than even the current-gen RTX 5050, and it's unable to beat any recent 60-series GPU as well. You'd have to go as far back as the RX 6600 or the RTX 3060 8GB to find something that the 1080 Ti edges out. Speaking of which, it is still faster than the Radeon VIII that came out two years later and matches the relative performance of the Titan X, while the Titan Xp clears it comfortably.

As you'd expect, the older the game, the better the 1080 Ti performs. Though its large VRAM buffer helps it win in some areas. For instance, it's barely faster than the aforementioned RTX 3060 in Assassin's Creed Shadows, Battlefield 6, Days Gone, and Baldur's Gate 3. X4 Timelines and Spider-Man 2 are surprise cases where it's faster than even the RTX 4060 and RX 7600. Stalker 2 was the only game where the 1080 Ti managed to beat the RTX 5060 as well, once again because of that extra memory.

In recent titles, reliance on technologies like upscaling and ray tracing severely hurts the king of a bygone raster-only era. DLSS and ray tracing were both mocked at the time they debuted, but have become integral parts of the industry now. Pascal lacks any Tensor or dedicated RT cores, forcing it to fall back to software emulation, which is basically unplayable. DOOM: The Dark Ages and the new Indiana Jones game wouldn't even boot on this GPU.

Averaged across all resolutions and 20 different games, testing shows the RX 5700 XT and RTX 2070 as its closest contemporaries. At 1080p, the resolution you'll actually play at, it's slightly more performant than the RX 6600 and RTX 2060 6GB, while being smoked by almost every midrange card from the last five years. Not to mention, even this performance requires an absurd amount of power by today's standards.

The GTX 1080 Ti posted the worst efficiency numbers on the chart, second only to the Radeon VII. The aging architecture mixed with the 16nm process node combines to give it a rating of 0.085 FPS per watt. In comparison, the current-gen RTX 5060 achieved 0.202 FPS per watt, meaning the 1080 Ti wastes 58% more energy under load, while the RTX 5080 had the best results at 0.253 FPS per watt.

Today, cards like the RTX 5070 have 250W TDPs, and they're almost three times as fast with that kind of power consumption. Not to mention, they're significantly cheaper compared to the 1080 Ti when adjusted for inflation. So, you're paying more for less performance, fewer features, and less efficiency, but maybe not less longevity, since the card is almost a decade old already. Keep in mind that Nvidia has stopped pushing driver optimizations for Pascal at this point as well.

If you want to check out all the benchmarks in detail, make sure to give our friends at PC Games Hardware a visit. Their excellent testing originally included comparisons against the Titan X and Titan Xp, since both use the same GPU, but neither of them is as illustrious as the 1080 Ti. The outlet actually argues its GOAT status and crowns the 2080 Ti as the true visionary, and the charts certainly back that up.

The answer to the question asked at the start is rather straightforward. If you already own the 1080 Ti and only have a 1080p monitor, you can still just about get by, though you're missing out on a lot. However, given the state of the PC hardware industry right now, it would be sacrilegious to recommend upgrading from an icon that championed the people's voice for so long. So if you don't find yourself wishing for more performance, features, or efficiency, ride that 1080 Ti till its dying breath!

Buying a new GPU is always a joyous occasion, but the celebration was cut short for an unfortunate customer in China. Right after buying an AX Gaming RTX 5060 Ti, they got into a serious car crash that ended up totaling the car — and the card along with it. Fortunately, the driver was safe, and somehow the GPU survived, too, with no major electronic damage. Despite being bent in half, the card ended up only requiring minor repair work and was brought back to life quickly by Brother Zhang.

Visually, the card didn't look salvageable, and midrange GPUs like these often don't make for feasible repair jobs either because of the high labor cost. The backplate and cooler were completely destroyed, so Brother Zhang separated them from the actual PCB. Luckily, this variant of the 5060 Ti used a very short PCB that just barely touched the point of curvature, so the internals were mostly fine.

The technician checked all the power rails for a short circuit but saw no abnormal resistance, which confirmed the core and memory weren't dead. He then proceeded to quickly test the GPU with its bare PCB, and it booted successfully. Brother Zhang devised a makeshift cooler that consisted of the bent fin stack straightened back to the best of his abilities, and two 120mm fans strapped on top via zip ties. This seemed enough to keep the card cool.

However, as soon as he tried to install drivers, the PC would black screen and hard crash, showing consistent signs of instability. At this point, Brother Zhang reopened the card and inspected the PCB. He inspected the flex point and decided to resolder the memory module closest to the edge of the board since it experienced the most torque. A simple removal and reapplication fixed the issue, and the card was detected correctly as a 5060 Ti with the full 8GB of VRAM.

Brother Zhang rechecked for any short circuits to ensure no solder bridges were created during the BGA work before moving on to benchmarking. In Furmark, the temps peaked and stabilized at 64°C with no visual artifacts. He then ran a full 3DMark loop to test the PCIe 5.0 x8 link speeds — the card passed with a high 98.9% stability score. It drew around 92% of its maximum power limit during the run, with core temps peaking at around 67°C. This 5060 Ti was officially a survivor.