You've perhaps seen our in-depth reviews of Nvidia's new RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 and decided that you're going to be better off spending your money on an RTX 40-series card instead. AMD's RDNA 4 cards won't be here for another month, too, so you've decided to go on the hunt for a nice RTX 4070 Super or an RX 7900 XT. However, if you stick with the major US retailers, you'll be served a whole load of nothing. Err, hello AMD and Nvidia? Where are all your graphics cards?
I've just spent the past two hours updating our GPU deals page, hunting through all the graphics cards listings at Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, Walmart, and B&H Photo to find the best offers on AMD Radeon, Intel Arc, and Nvidia GeForce models. Rather than go into detail about every model I've searched for, let me just show you this simple summary:
- RTX 5090: Sold out (or overpriced)
- RTX 5080: Sold out (or overpriced)
- RTX 4090: Sold out (or overpriced)
- RTX 4080 Super: Sold out (or overpriced)
- RTX 4070 Ti Super: Sold out (or overpriced)
- RTX 4070 Super: Sold out (or overpriced)
- RTX 4070: Sold out (or overpriced)
- RTX 4060 Ti: $400 @ Amazon
- RTX 4060: $295 @ Newegg
- RX 7900 XTX: Sold out (or overpriced)
- RX 7900 XT: $730 @ Amazon
- RX 7900 GRE: Sold out (or overpriced)
- RX 7800 XT: $490 @ Amazon
- RX 7700 XT: $400 @ Amazon
- RX 7600: $260 @ Walmart
- Arc B580: Sold out (or overpriced)
- Arc B570: $230 @ Newegg
Yep, that's right. Almost the entire inventory of mid-range or higher-tier graphics cards is gone. There's zip out there, nothing, nyet, nada, nowt. Well, okay, there are some GPUs you can find, but they're either being sold at well over their MSRPs, or the retailers in question don't have confidence-inspiring reviews.
If I'm going to spend more than $500 on a graphics card, I want to be sure that the returns policy is as solid as steel and that I'll get my money back if I'm shipped a literal brick. The situation is not massively better here in the UK, though you can still get an RX 7900 XTX or an RTX 4080 Super at a below-MSRP price.
So, what on Earth is going on? Why is there such a dearth of graphics cards? The reason is simple(ish): AMD and Nvidia decided to wind down production of their 'last-gen' cards well before a wealth of new models could replace them. The sell-through rate of distribution centres and major retailers has been extraordinarily high, probably because they were expecting lots of new cards to arrive in January.
But, what we actually got was almost a paper launch with the RTX 50-series, with such few numbers of RTX 5090 and 5080 cards that retailers' shelves were bare within mere minutes of the products going on sale. In some cases, the shelves were empty before that point because they had already been sold. AMD, on the other hand, teased RDNA 4 before our eyes at CES but then took weeks before finally announcing that the cards themselves wouldn't be ready until early March.
Meanwhile, budget-savvy PC gamers took one look at the prices of the Blackwell cards, blinked a few times, and then ran off to snap up the remaining stocks of higher-tier RTX 40 cards. Want to grab an RTX 4070 variant? Tough luck, I'm afraid, but you can get the rather nice RX 7800 XT for a reasonable price. That's a GPU I regularly use for testing game performance and it's a real trooper of a mid-range graphics card.
The obvious question to ask at this point is, 'When will GPU stocks get better?' Unfortunately, nobody has a concrete answer to that query but I suspect it's not going to be for a while, with March being the very earliest. That's when we'll be able to get our hands on the Radeon RX 9070-series but if AMD and its partners can't meet demand, we're going to be right back to square on.
Nvidia's RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti are generally expected to be launched towards the end of February, but after the dearth of the 5080 cards on shelves (well, the dearth of sensibly priced 5080 cards), I'm not overly optimistic about 5070 stocks being good.
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
And don't look to Intel to save the day, as it can barely get enough Arc 580 cards out to meet demand, too. The slightly less potent B570 is available but that's a budget-tier card, though not budget enough compared to the similarly priced, but evidently superior Arc B580. Intel simply doesn't have anything to offer the mid-range/mainstream market and probably won't for a long time (if at all).
All of this means that whatever graphics card you currently have will have to suffice for a good while longer. I'd avoid going down the second-hand route if you have quite an old GPU and you're hoping to pick up a cheap RTX 30-series, for example, as prices have gone up due to the paucity of new models.
The truth of the matter is now that AMD and Nvidia make gazillions of dollars in the data centre market, gaming graphics cards are just hors d'oeuvres for the revenue sheets. Fancy new graphics architectures are good for headlines, but it's just not where the money is. Nice for the chip giants, rotten for PC gamers. Same as it ever was, I guess.
