The prices of Nvidia’s RTX 50-series graphics cards have gotten so out of hand that you may need to spend close to $5,000 if you want to buy a top-end RTX 5090 GPU. The only way to ignore this terrible pricing irony is to travel to QuakeCon, where Nvidia is granting some lucky attendees the chance to buy one of these high-end graphics cards for a measly $2,000.
Nvidia is attending the annual gaming conference with its typical swag bus parked out front. QuakeCon is hosted by ZeniMax, normally to promote recent games from id Software—in this case, the expansion pack to Doom: The Dark Ages, called Revelations—as well as other recent titles from Bethesda and ZeniMax Media. For Nvidia, it’s a chance to allow some lucky people to swing by the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas, to purchase the Founders Edition RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090.
Nvidia normally takes its swag booth whenever it’s trying to make a splash. © Kyle Barr / GizmodoI’ll reiterate: these cards are being sold at MSRP. That means an RTX 5070 costs $550, an RTX 5080 $1,000, and an RTX 5090 $2,000. These are not cheap cards, but they’re so much cheaper than what they cost now. An Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 card can easily cost well over $4,000. A Reddit user recently posted that their $4,492 order of Nvidia’s top-end card had been denied due to impending price increases. The user recently deleted their post, though it comes on the heels of numerous reports that GPUs are seeing price hikes across the board.
Nvidia has hosted these “Verified Priority Access IRL” GPU sales at various conventions and showcases in the past year. Even at launch, it was one of the few ways consumers could score these GPUs for around the suggested list price. The RTX 50-series launch was notoriously limited back in 2025, which is what kicked off the price inflation.
If you don’t end up with a GPU, you can find Nvidia staff on the show floor handing out the next best thing: trading cards detailing Nvidia’s past gaming GPUs, before it became the AI monolith it is today. Just don’t mention the irony of how its campaign for AI data centers has inflated the cost of these chips.
It’s QuakeCon’s 20th anniversary this year, but Nvidia’s GPU stall may become one of the event’s biggest attractions (hopefully, not just by graphics card scalpers). The beloved studio id Software was one of the developers caught up in the devastating Xbox “reset.” Staff at the time reported that close to half the studio had been laid off. Id Software later claimed in a statement it had “the crew we need to make great games” despite the staffing cuts.
This is a bad time for the people making both games and gaming hardware. Memory prices have skyrocketed, driven by the push to create AI hyperscalers and data centers. PC component prices, especially RAM and GPUs, have become untenable for most DIY builders. Now, the only way to buy any component at anything close to an affordable price is a matter of luck—or rather, attending the right convention at the right time.
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