GeForce GPU Price Skyrockets as Nvidia's Top-End Graphics Card Becomes Surprise AI Workhorse

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090, a high-end graphics card for gaming PCs, has seen its price skyrocket to over $5,000 due to demand from AI system builders.

The 5090 was originally launched in January 2023 with an MSRP of $1,999 but is now being used as a substitute for Nvidia's enterprise GPU, the RTX 6000, despite having some key differences.

Both GPUs share similarities in their spec sheets and are built on the same Blackwell architecture. However, the RTX 6000 has more cores (24,000) and higher maximum performance (126 TFLOPS), compared to the 5090's 21,000 cores and 104 TFLOPS.

The main difference lies in onboard memory: the 5090 comes with 32GB of memory, while the RTX 6000 has a whopping 96 GB. This significant disparity affects AI workloads, as larger models cannot be loaded onto the 5090 due to its limited memory capacity.