NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080 sales restrictions rumor: no businesses, just PC gamers
NVIDIA has reportedly placed restrictions on which retailers across the world will have supply of the new GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards… with supply to remain TIGHT at launch, and I’m sure many weeks post-launch.
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In some new reports from PC Games Hardware forums moderator “Pockerlock”, we might not see Amazon even get any of the first shipments of NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards. Even a giant like Amazon might not just miss out on the first wave of Blackwell cards, but also miss out on the second and even third wave of RTX 50 cards.
NVIDIA’s new ultra-enthusiast flagship GeForce RTX 5090 with its 32GB of ultra-fast GDDR7 memory is going to be a harder card to find than the RTX 5080 16GB, with its $1999+ pricing and scarcity as the bleeding edge GPU on the market, will make it a hard purchase for the first few weeks at the very least. We’ll probably see stable RTX 5090 + RTX 5080 supply in the coming months, as see just how crazy the demand is for the latest RTX 50 series GPUs.
On top of that, it appears NVIDIA is focusing the first few waves of GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards towards gamers and consumers, versus businesses who want to buy multiple of them at once. This move makes sense, as it’ll stop the businesses that have the money (to dump $1999+ per RTX 5090) and buy 10 of them at once, it’ll also stop scalpers from buying multiple RTX 50 series cards at once.
These sources are inside of Germany, so we don’t know if this is a rule placed down by NVIDIA into the EU, or if we’ll see these types of restriction tactics globally. NVIDIA probably doesn’t have enough RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards to handle the flood of people upgrading — business customers, scalpers, AI farms, etc in between — so these restrictions will help keep the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 flowing to actual PC gamers wanting to upgrade or buy a new PC.
Pockerlock explained (with machine translation): “the launch of NVIDIA’s new graphics cards is approaching, and according to well-informed sources in the retail sector, the available stock of graphics cards will be extremely limited! This is especially true for the RTX 5090”.
“NVIDIA is reportedly determining exactly where and who will be offering the graphics cards at launch. B2B retailers, as well as the entire domestic wholesale sector — which primarily caters to business customers — will most likely be left empty-handed. Anyone wanting to get a 5090 or 5080 at launch will need to join the digital queue with waiting (private) customers at retail outlets. Scalpers and bots are also expected to play a role herre. Purchasable quantities are likely to be limited to just one unit per customer”.