After a run of RTX 50-series launches with seemingly little availability and mega price tags, I'm left wondering 'is that it?'

The embers are still hot from Nvidia's RTX 5070 graphics card launch, but looking around, you'd be hard-pressed to tell anything happened at all.

I've covered a good few GPU launches in my time, including the crypto/covid-driven shortages, and I've been a customer trying to buy a GPU in the past. So I get that it's pretty much guaranteed to be a horrible time to secure a graphics card, or really any tech, on release day. But there's something about the RTX 50-series launch that feels completely futile.

Over our lunch today, my colleagues and I were searching for the RTX 5070. We hit the main places: in the US that's Best Buy, Newegg, B&H, Micro Center; in the UK that's Scan, Overclockers, Ebuyer, and even high street chain Currys. We even went further afield to the more niche retailers, such as MSI's own webstore and Novatech (remember them?).

And what did we find?

Nothing much at all, really. A handful of overpriced RTX 5070s, like the one below, and none at MSRP, bar one noted as entered into Newegg's lottery system, Newegg Shuffle. The ones we did find were getting up to the MSRP of the RTX 5070 Ti of $749, though that was about as ephemeral a price tag for the Ti as the $549 price tag of the RTX 5070.

Blink and they're gone, too. Even the overpriced ones.

It was all pretty bleak, leading us on the team to say things such as "I honestly didn't think it would be this bad" and "I haven't seen the FE model go up at all".

Yeah, the Founders Edition model, the saving grace for gamers everywhere as a card that's actually sold at MSRP… it was noted as "Coming soon" at Best Buy and, with multiple staff members watching, turned to "Out of stock" without a single one of us seeing it ever noted as available. Nvidia's website in the UK was the official carrier for the FE, supposedly, and again, we never saw it arrive.

The worst thing is, this wasn't an isolated event. I also watched the RTX 5070 Ti launch closely, and the RTX 5070 launch was basically just a re-run of the Ti card launch. There were few to no MSRP cards, some overpriced third-party units, and it was all largely gone in a flash and left a foul smell in the air afterwards.

This feels a little different to previous periods of catastrophic supply issues. During the double whammy of Covid-19 and cryptocurrency mining on GPUs at its peak, you couldn't buy a graphics card without treating searching for one like a new, all-encompassing hobby. It sucked. But where that was huge demand for a product combined with global shipping and production issues to make one awful experience for the average gamer, this launch feels like it was doomed from the start.

The lack of MSRP cards has to sting the worst. Whatever the reasoning behind it, manufacturers are not prepared to sell many cards close to Nvidia's MSRP. Is that Nvidia's MSRP that's the problem? Manufacturers? Are retailers making it worse to cover their bottom line? Whatever the reason, the problem has seen to sting gamers the most, as we're looking at real-world prices often so far in excess of MSRP for Nvidia's cards, they're practically the price for the next tier of GPU up.

Paying $1,000 for a graphics card stings. Paying $1,000 for a graphics card that should cost $750 is worse.

I'm not offering any sort of solution here, but I'd be keen to hear one. Something, anything, from Nvidia about how it might help ease this problem. Same goes for AMD if it cannot keep a lid on third-party prices (for its lack of a reference card) with its RX 9070-series launch tomorrow, led by the RX 9070 XT. If this is the new reality of graphics card prices, why?

Going back to Nvidia, its latest GPUs are built on a similar process node to their RTX 40-series predecessors. Bar the genuinely huge RTX 5090 chip, they're no larger than last gen, and in the case of the RTX 5070, its GPU is smaller than the AD104 die used on the RTX 4070. The memory might cost a little more, and maybe there's a degree of demand (for the 5070?), but this feels like a weirdly paper launch for a graphics card generation a long time coming.

It's just been a tough watch, from my point of view. These last few launches have been brutal and unforgiving. I've mentioned it with my colleagues, but systems put in place to reward people through Discord participation just for the chance to buy a full-price graphics card feel extremely bleak to me. Some colleagues disagree with that, saying it's a good shot at a card for loyal customers, but I don't understand why there's the need for it right now. The world isn't a great place with wars and tariffs, but the direct impact of Covid and cryptocurrency on graphics card supply was at least easier to understand.

I offer no answers here—sorry if you wanted some—but this is more of just an exasperated sigh of a story. As far as paper launches go, of which there have been many, this one feels like one of the worst I've covered. And I'm sure there are some stats out there that make it sound like Nvidia sold a bajillion cards, which might be true, but I certainly haven't seen much proof of that on the ground. And the prices… don't get me started on those again.