It sounded like a miracle: Nvidia’s new budget GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card, priced at just $550, would perform even better than last generation’s $1,600 RTX 4090. That was the claim CEO Jensen Huang made on stage at CES 2025 a couple of months ago. It turns out it was (mostly) bullshit, but the RTX 5070 is already selling out regardless, despite major price hikes.
Reviews for Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070 went live this week and all of them harped on Huang’s claim. “To call [the two cards] the same is an absolute flat-out lie,” tech channel Gamers Nexus said in its video after comparing the performance with the 4090. “This is a 4090 Killer… and I’m a Liar,” was the title of Linus Tech Tips’ review. Ars Technica wrote that it was “hard to classify the RTX 5070 as anything other than a disappointment.”
The site’s testing showed performance for the 5070 at just slightly above that of last year’s 4070 Super, despite a significant increase in power consumption. The only way Nvidia’s claim of performance parity with the 4090 even begins to make sense is by using the company’s new DLSS Multi-Frame Generation tech. It significantly boosts framerates by interpolating three frames for every one actually rendered frame. The result made Cyberpunk 2077 and other games feel sluggish and subject to lots of visual artifacting while moving.
But broken CES promises are only part of the story. Outside of that context the 5070 might be a fine incremental improvement on last year’s models at a similar price. But the graphics card market right now is so chaotic and undersupplied that no one actually expects to be able to get the new budget cards at the official $550 MSRP. As PC Mag notes, launch day stock almost immediately sold out, if it was ever really available to begin with.
The 5070 cards people could actually find for sale were $650 or more, and things will seemingly only get worse until new stock emerges. In the meantime, there are scalper listings in the $1,000s. One ray of hope is AMD’s new Radeon RX 9070 line, which has been getting rave reviews so far. It’s also selling for above the $550-600 MSRP at the moment, but seems to be less scarce overall. There’s no telling just how the broader graphics card market will shake out amid trade wars and the ongoing AI arms race, but decent competition for Nvidia can’t hurt.
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