Unless you’ve spent the last twelve hours or so in a tent outside a Best Buy, you probably don’t have a new Nvidia card in your hands right now. In a depressingly familiar sight, the RTX 5070 has immediately sold out at every online retailer, following the same pattern as the RTX 5070 Ti and 5080/5090 launches over the last few weeks. Initial stocks are depleted despite huge markups on most models.
Less than ten minutes after the 9 AM EST launch, Best Buy, Newegg, and B&H all showed every single RTX 5070 card as out of stock or otherwise unavailable. Between high demand from PC gamers (and the scalpers who want to take advantage of them) and apparently very low output for the card launches, things are looking pretty grim for anyone who wants to get a new card, especially at retail prices.
Nvidia’s manufacturing partners, like Asus and Gigabyte, also seem to be loathe to sell these cards at the retail prices announced at CES 2025. Several “enhanced” models of the RTX 5070 are going for almost $750, closer to the next-level-up RTX 5070 Ti’s suggested price.
Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry
Of course, that’s an academic point since you can’t buy them anyway. Nvidia’s Founders Edition card — the Nvidia-branded version without any fancy extras — isn’t even available at launch. (It’s allegedly coming later this month.) It seems particularly cruel that the RTX 5070 is instantly so difficult to find, since it’s easily the least-impressive card of the new batch in terms of both power and value. Nvidia’s claim that the next-gen card has the same performance as the RTX 4090 thanks to Multi Frame Generation is looking especially shaky after initial reviews.
Manufacturers and retailers are quick to blame the Trump regime’s consumer-punishing import tariffs for rising prices, but that can only account for so much of the markup. As Engadget columnist Igor Bonifacic pointed out yesterday, it looks more like Nvidia’s AIB partners are taking advantage of the assumption that cards will sell for higher prices and putting their thumbs on the scale. For the first few months, anyway, it seems like these companies are assuming they’ll sell every single card they can make (either to PC gamers or scalpers) and have thus built in higher prices to make hay while the sun shines.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that AMD set its embargo for Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT reviews for around the same time, competing directly with Nvidia’s 5070 and 5070 Ti, respectively. The higher-end card puts the GeForce equivalent to shame for $150 less. At sticker price, anyway. We’ll have to see what the prices look like for the official launch tomorrow morning… and whether anyone can actually find one to buy.
