The demand for 4K-ready graphics cards from both Nvidia and AMD hasn’t slowed by any measure. Neither have the prices on top-end GPUs. Costs will likely get worse in the new year due to the ongoing memory shortage. One of Nvidia’s leading board partners is reportedly shelving one of the few cards that’s powerful enough for playing at the highest resolutions.
The GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPU is Nvidia’s gateway for 4K gaming on PC. The GPU has the 16GB of VRAM necessary to support titles at higher resolutions, though normally with the need to fine-tune graphics settings if you also want to push ray tracing for more realistic lighting effects.
The Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel reported that Asus has explicitly said it was placing its add-in-card (AIC) RTX 5070 Ti into end-of-life status. Essentially, whatever existing Asus 5070 Ti GPUs are on store shelves will be the last inventory available, at least for now. That would ostensibly account for both the cards under the TUF Gaming and Prime branding. In a statement provided to Gizmodo, an Asus rep said the company “cannot confirm the news put out by Hardware Unboxed” and added, “No US PR spokesperson would have spoken to distribution plans for Nvidia’s general distribution strategy.”
There have been enough rumors floating around about Nvidia GPU scarcity to make any PC gamer wince, though this is the first time we’re hearing from an AIB (add-in-board) partner effectively confirming there’s dwindling inventory. Major memory makers, including Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, have all tuned their operations to producing high-end memory for AI data centers. This has caused a massive shortage in both RAM and—increasingly—SSD and NAND storage. GPUs make use of VRAM, aka video random access memory, to help render and display 3D graphics on PCs. More VRAM is necessary for higher resolutions, like 1440p and 4K.
The RTX 5060 Ti may also be taking a hit
The RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB of RAM may also be deprioritized in favor of the 8GB version. © NvidiaNvidia may be prioritizing select GPUs in its stack depending on how much VRAM is inside it. The 5070 Ti only had options for 16GB of VRAM. However, the 5060 Ti has both 8GB and 16GB options. In a Facebook post, the Chinese-language media outlet HKEPC (via VideoCardz and read with machine translation) said Nvidia will prioritize lower-end GPUs with only 8GB of VRAM. The RTX 5060 will get deprioritized in favor of its more powerful cousin. Meanwhile, the top-end RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 will still have broader availability. The RTX 5070 sports 12GB of VRAM, though sources have less to say about the future of that mid-range GPU.
Retailers may have little ability to purchase RTX 5070 Ti or RTX 5060 Ti GPUs, according to Hardware Unboxed. What’s more concerning is that the only GPUs available in “any reasonable quantities” may be versions with 8GB of VRAM.
In an email statement provided to Gizmodo, Nvidia said, “Demand for GeForce RTX GPUs is strong, and memory supply is constrained. We continue to ship all GeForce SKUs and are working closely with our suppliers to maximize memory availability.”
Nvidia could be reducing the supply of certain GPUs for the beginning of 2026, if not further down the road. We will have to wait and see what prices and availability look like in a few weeks. The loss of supply is certain to push the cost of GPUs even higher among retailers thanks to diminished inventory. The scalpers, as usual, will have a field day if GPU scarcity gets even worse.
Nvidia did not offer a peep about any RTX 50-series Super generation of GPUs early this year, leading to speculation that any next-gen GPUs may be delayed. CEO Jensen Huang detailed more about its supersized Vera Rubin AI processing chips during his keynote at CES 2026. The next “Rubin” series of GPUs to replace today’s current “Blackwell” RTX series may not be along until years to come, hopefully when the RAM shortage has run its course.
Fewer GPUs on the market will inevitably mean higher prices. One of AMD’s execs, David McAfee, told Gizmodo in an interview the company was doing what it could to keep costs low on its Radeon RX 9070 XT—the direct competitor to the RTX 5070 Ti. We can only hope that there will be at least a few 16GB GPUs to keep PC gamers afloat through 2026.
This post was updated 1/15/25 at 2:30 p.m. ET to include comments from Asus and Nvidia.
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