// PC GAMER — GAMING
The RTX 4090 launched four years ago today, and now the RTX 5090 is rumoured for the chop, I can't help but look upon it with a warm glow
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Join me in saying "Happy birthday" to the RTX 4090, Nvidia's enthusiast-level graphics card of the previous generation. It launched four years ago today, October 12, with an eye-watering MSRP of $1,499.
Well, eye-watering for the time. The cheapest RTX 5080 I can find right now is this Asus Prime variant for $1,640, which is a sure sign of how things have changed in the past four years. When the second-from-top Nvidia card is now significantly more expensive than the launch MSRP of the previous generation big boi model, it's pretty easy to see how far we've fallen.
And the RTX 4090's direct replacement, the RTX 5090, has reached near-unobtanium status. We've stopped tracking it on our graphics card price watch page, as the only listings around are priced at ludicrous levels from third-party sellers we're not comfortable recommending. Now rumours suggest Nvidia may have halted production of RTX 5090 chips for the consumer market, with the GB202 silicon being used for data center and professional GPUs instead.
Which makes me think of the RTX 4090 with a heavy dose of nostalgia. I had a hunt through the PC Gamer kit cupboard recently and came across our review sample, an absolute cinderblock of a GPU that still looks outrageous today. And that's before you get to the specs sheet, which is still impressive in 2026.
24 GB of GDDR6X. 76.3 billion transistors. 16,384 CUDA cores, a 56% increase over the RTX 3090. 128 shader modules, 128 ray tracing cores, 512 Tensor cores. This is still a giant of a graphics card even by modern standards, and I know quite a few gamers still running one. They bit the bullet and paid the then-exorbitant price tag, and have been enjoying the monstrous power of their over-specced GPU ever since.
If you had the cash on hand at the time, buying one was, in hindsight, a pretty smart move. Our Dave quite rightly called out the prohibitive pricing in his RTX 4090 Founders Edition review, but couldn't help but be impressed by its gaming chops—and it also provided us our first proper look at DLSS Frame Generation, in its early 2x form.
With so much grunt on offer, in combination with a new framerate-assisting feature, those who could swallow the price tag ended up with a GPU that still kicks like the proverbial mule all these years later.
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And now an RTX 5080 costs more cash, with lesser raw performance (although with Multi Frame Generation support, which seems to have split the room in terms of gamer opinion), dropping such a sum on Nvidia's halo card seems to have worked out well for those who could afford it.