Join me in saying "Happy birthday" to the RTX 4090, Nvidia's enthusiast-level graphics card of the previous generation. It launched four years ago today, October 12, with an eye-watering MSRP of $1,499.
Well, eye-watering for the time. The cheapest RTX 5080 I can find right now is this Asus Prime variant for $1,640, which is a sure sign of how things have changed in the past four years. When the second-from-top Nvidia card is now significantly more expensive than the launch MSRP of the previous generation big boi model, it's pretty easy to see how far we've fallen.
And the RTX 4090's direct replacement, the RTX 5090, has reached near-unobtanium status. We've stopped tracking it on our graphics card price watch page, as the only listings around are priced at ludicrous levels from third-party sellers we're not comfortable recommending. Now rumours suggest Nvidia may have halted production of RTX 5090 chips for the consumer market, with the GB202 silicon being used for data center and professional GPUs instead.
Which makes me think of the RTX 4090 with a heavy dose of nostalgia. I had a hunt through the PC Gamer kit cupboard recently and came across our review sample, an absolute cinderblock of a GPU that still looks outrageous today. And that's before you get to the specs sheet, which is still impressive in 2026.
24 GB of GDDR6X. 3 billion transistors. 16,384 CUDA cores, a 56% increase over the RTX 3090 . 128 shader modules, 128 ray tracing cores, 512 Tensor cores.
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