Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti sells out instantly, surprising no one

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, the third graphics card in its newest 50-series generation, officially went on sale this morning… and less than an hour after it became available, it’s out of stock in every US online store. You might have more luck if you try to get it at physical retailers like MicroCenter, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

At the time of writing, I’m unable to put any card in a shopping cart at Best Buy, Newegg, or B&H. If Amazon has any cards available, I haven’t found them… but I’m sure resellers will have listings up on there soon, as well as on places like eBay, for vastly inflated prices. That’s on top of the already-high prices for OEM card designs, since Nvidia isn’t making its own Founder’s Edition.

The same thing happened a few weeks ago with the launch of the RTX 5080 and 5090 cards, despite sky-high prices. Then, as now, a combination of factors seems to have led to an even more frustrating launch than usual with new high-powered hardware. There’s pent-up demand two years after the RTX 40-series debuted, AI companies are gobbling up GPU supplies, and Nvidia seems to have unusually low supplies of the latest cards. Some retailers are projecting restock waiting times of weeks or even months.

Then, throw in the usual scalpers and retailers trying to make a quick buck off of a hot item, combined with inflated prices for OEM cards with enhancements of questionable utility. Not to mention both manufacturers and retailers bumping up prices for both the usual reasons and the ongoing trade war demanded by the Trump regime. It’s a perfect storm of gotchas for PC gamers.

We’re still waiting to hear the details of AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT cards, which should be competing with the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti, respectively. Hopefully AMD will try to beat Nvidia on price as it cedes ground at the top of the market. There’s also news of RTX 5050, 5060, and 5060 Ti cards on the horizon, not to mention Intel showing off some impressive performance at the entry level for its second-generation Arc discrete graphics cards.

But there’s no getting around it. If you demand a new, high-end Nvidia card, you’re either going to have to spend a lot of money (even more than they already cost), spend a lot of time tracking one down, or be very, very fortunate. Probably a mix of all three.