Gamers were upset when NVIDIA announced the RTX 5090 graphics card because it is nearly hard to find the new product on the market. In many places, the biggest US retailers, including Micro Center, had fewer than five units available. There was not a single card transported to Chicago.

Such a limited number of graphics cards will spur speculation and price hikes, making an already expensive product even less affordable.

Although the Micro Center store in Tustin had 67 units available, other locations like Brooklyn only received 4 cards each. This caused a huge stir among shoppers. People were waiting in line in advance to get their hands on the new product, despite its starting price tag of $2000. At the same time, resellers are already selling the card for $6000.

RTX 5080, the next card in the Blackwell lineup, is available in sufficient quantities. But initial testing shows that its performance in some games is inferior to the RTX 4080 Super. This raises doubts about whether the price is justified. 

Micro Center USAImage: x.com

RTX 5090 performed better than the RTX 4090 when the new NVIDIA graphics cards were released. Experts noted that the experiments employed a variety of data compression techniques, which may have skewed the results. 

FP8 (8-bit) compression was used to test the RTX 4090, whereas FP4 (4-bit) compression was utilized to test the RTX 5090. Because FP4 uses half as much video RAM, the difference in compression has a big impact on performance, which is why the RTX 5090 performs better. In spite of this, NVIDIA displayed comparative charts that showed the RTX 5090 outperforming the RTX 4090 by almost twice as much.

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