The RTX 5090 Is Reportedly Dead. Nvidia Hasn't Said So, and the Cards Vanished Weeks Ago.

Nvidia has not discontinued the GeForce RTX 5090, because Nvidia has not said anything at all. What exists is a short post on X from a leaker called hongxing2020 and a factory notice that has been quoted but never shown. Meanwhile the $1,999 card was already gone from the big US retail sites by mid-September.

What the rumor rests on

Tom's Hardware, in a report by Anton Shilov, said hongxing2020 cited a notice from an unnamed factory. The quoted text reads: "Nvidia will no longer manufacture any RTX 5090 models, including the D variants." The top GeForce card would then be an RTX 5080 with 24GB of memory. The 16GB RTX 5080 would be dropped. A second leaker, Zed__Wang, backed the report, according to Tom's.

I read hongxing2020's X feed on October 11. The post dated October 9 reads, in full, "5090 EOL" and "5080 24GB ready," each followed by an emoji. The visible text carries no notice and no document. The quoted notice reaches readers only through Tom's.

The coverage that followed leans on the same posts. The site tbreak adds a third leaker, MEGAsizeGPU, who it says wrote on October 10 that all future GB202 supplies are exclusive to RTX Pro cards. It also points out that ending new chip allocations is not the same as discontinuing a card, since partners could keep selling boards built from stock they already hold.

One data point on the source. In September 2025, hongxing2020 posted that the RTX 50 Super series was delayed. tbreak says a July 2026 report put that launch on hold because 3GB memory modules are expensive. One hit says little about notices like this one, and I could not find a base rate for how often leaked end-of-life notices prove accurate.

The economics are plausible, which is not evidence

The rumor has a motive. Nvidia's own product pages describe the RTX 5090 as carrying 32 GB of GDDR7 and the RTX PRO 5500 workstation card as carrying 84 GB. Tom's says the two share the same core count, 21,760, and that the fuller RTX 6000 Pro on the same chip family can easily sell for $15,000. A company with limited chips does not need a spreadsheet to see which earns more.

A separate Tom's Hardware report from September 14 adds a number worth setting beside the street prices. It says Nvidia's RTX Pro 5000 48GB, built on the same GPU, sells for between $7,000 and $9,000. The gaming card's third-party prices had arrived in that same band. Resellers were already pricing the 5090 like a workstation part.

The shelves emptied first

Jake Roach of Tom's Hardware wrote on September 14 that the median RTX 5090 price in June was $4,299. The lowest online price in the site's tracker at the start of September was $5,199. Then, in under two weeks, first-party stock disappeared. What remained at Newegg and Amazon came from third-party sellers. One Newegg seller had 239 ratings and a 2.8 out of 5 score. An Amazon seller at $6,395 had recent one-star reviews about orders never being fulfilled.

Two days later, PC Gamer's Jess Kinghorn put the same squeeze in one card. A Gigabyte Windforce RTX 5090 had been $5,700 at Newegg the previous Thursday. It was now $9,050 from a third-party reseller. Amazon and Best Buy showed it sold out, and the cheapest new card she found was an Asus TUF at $6,800, again from a reseller. PC Gamer's price tracker showed an 83 percent increase.

The rumor arrived about three and a half weeks after that. If the factory notice is real, it would explain the empty shelves. But the September reports do not need it. Tom's pointed to AI demand, with buyers weighing the card for servers even at $5,000, and to the scams that cluster around high-ticket GPUs. The exception was Micro Center, which sells graphics cards only in person. The cheapest unit Tom's checked there was $4,299.

What would settle it

Tom's expects that even if Nvidia has stopped supplying GB202 for GeForce, partners and retailers hold inventory that will keep boards trickling out. That means no clean announcement day. The signal would be the day partner stock runs dry, or a line change on Nvidia's own site. When I checked on October 11, the RTX 5090 page still loaded as a live product page, and I found no end-of-life language on it.

The card has a $1,999 list price and a street price three to nearly five times that. Nobody on the record can say how many more will ship. The rumor adds a cause to a shortage that was already there. It has not yet added a fact.