Look, we do this every week. Coffee, second monitor, the same three browser tabs, refreshing graphics card prices like this time it’ll be different. It never is. It’s basically a ritual at this point, except instead of good luck we get a nosebleed and a quiet urge to go outside.
And yeah, before anyone says it in the comments: the scalpers are still out there feasting like it’s 2021 all over again. But that’s a rant for another day, because honestly the official prices are doing enough damage on their own without any help.
So let’s actually talk about what a GPU costs right now, in the cold light of August 2026, and whether you should hand over the money or hide your wallet in a drawer.
The damage, and it is real damage
Here’s the bit that made us put the coffee down. The RTX 5070 launched at 549 dollars. A perfectly reasonable number. You could look at it and think, sure, that’s a graphics card. Today? A normal one runs about 850, and at some retailers the median has crept toward 900. Same card. Same silicon. Roughly 300 dollars of extra “because we can”.
The 5080 went out at 999 and now lounges around 1,400 like it owns the place. And the 5090, the big daft halo card everyone secretly wants and nobody can justify, launched at 1,999 and has been spotted north of 5,000 when it’s in stock at all. Five grand. For a graphics card. We remember when that was a used car, or at least a very optimistic holiday.
AMD, credit where it’s due, held the line better. The RX 9070 XT shipped at 599 and mostly sits around 700 now, and it has even dipped to actual MSRP at the odd retailer, which in this market feels like spotting a unicorn on the bus. Its little brother, the RX 9070, hovers near 650. Both come with a proper 16GB of memory, and hold that thought, because memory is the whole villain of this story.
Why is this happening? (Blame the robots)
One word: memory. Every RTX 50 and RX 9000 board leans on fast GDDR6 or GDDR7, and the price of that memory has doubled or tripled depending on the day and the mood of the market. Why? AI. Of course it’s AI. Training and inference eat memory by the truckload, and every wafer a factory hands to some data centre’s shiny accelerator is a wafer it did not hand to the graphics memory sitting in your gaming rig.
Which means, and this is the genuinely annoying part, you are quietly bidding against ChatGPT’s cousins for the same chips. You, a person who just wants 90fps in a game about shooting demons, versus a server farm the size of a Tesco. Guess who wins that one.
So no, this isn’t a normal price spike that patience fixes in a month. The pressure is baked in, and nobody sensible is calling the top yet.
The one card we’d actually spend money on
If you genuinely need a card today, no wriggle room, the machine is dead and payday came: get the Radeon RX 9070 XT. It’s the closest thing to MSRP in the entire lineup, it’s got a real 16GB of VRAM (there’s that memory again), and independent testing puts it at roughly 19 percent better value per frame than the RTX 5070 Ti. Across a big messy library of games, old and new, it’s the card that robs you least.
Tighter budget? The RTX 5050 at 299 and the RTX 5060 at 359 are the least offensive doorways into current-gen, as long as you make peace with less memory and less headroom. And if you’re circling a 5080 or 5090 purely to “future-proof”, we’re going to gently take your hand off the mouse. That’s not future-proofing, that’s a fear tax with RGB.
So, buy now or wait?
If your current card still runs the games you love, wait. This market is broken, and that is not your fault.
We know, we know. That’s the boring answer, and boring answers never got anyone a shiny new box on the doorstep. But paying 850 quid for a card that should cost 549 isn’t a deal, it’s a polite surrender. Hang onto what you’ve got. Drop a couple of settings from Ultra to High (spoiler: your eyes won’t file a complaint). Let the memory madness burn itself out.
And if you truly must upgrade, buy the 9070 XT, grab it at the best price you can find, and then, crucially, stop looking at prices. For your own sanity. We’ll keep refreshing the tabs so you don’t have to. Someone has to suffer, and it might as well be us.
Want to know where Nvidia goes from here? Our RTX 50 Super breakdown gets into the next round.
