Nvidia insists the GeForce RTX 5090 has not been discontinued, but its GPU keeps turning up elsewhere, with the latest emerging as the RTX PRO 5500, a workstation card that US reseller SHI Government Solutions listed recently at $17,999.

That overlap has fueled claims that Nvidia is simply rebadging its gaming flagship as a pro card to maximize profits while abandoning gamers.

The reality, however, might be more nuanced, and arguably more consequential for anyone still hoping to buy a 5090.

On paper, the RTX 5090 and RTX 5500 Pro have almost everything that matters for compute. Both use the GB202 die with 170 of its 192 streaming multiprocessors enabled, giving each 21,760 CUDA cores, 680 Tensor cores, and 96 MB of L2 cache.

It would therefore not be a far cry to suggest that Nvidia essentially took the RTX 5090, slapped on higher-capacity memory, and launched it as the RTX 5500 Pro. There are, however, some differences in the boards around that silicon.

As we reported when the card appeared in September 2026, the RTX PRO 5500 packs 84GB of ECC GDDR7 memory using 28 3GB modules split across both sides of the board, compared to 32GB on the 5090. It runs that memory over a narrower, slower interface, so bandwidth falls to 1,398GB/s from the 5090's 1,792GB/s, a 22% cut.

The GPU is rated for 600W rather than 575W, can be split into two isolated 42GB instances, ships with professional drivers, and is built for rack-mounted workstations with blower or liquid cooling.

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