Gamers decided that the RTX 5090 can no longer be called a gaming graphics card – it has become too expensive

The graphics card that now costs as much as a used car is losing its right to be called a gaming product.

The RTX 5090 stopped being the ceiling for gamers a while ago and turned into something between consumer hardware and a data center accelerator.

The idea behind a recent Reddit thread is simple: since the price tag has gone into orbit, the card belongs next to the H100 rather than the rest of the 50 series. One gamer straight up suggested dropping the 5090 from game benchmarks entirely, so studios stop treating it as the ceiling of achievable performance.

The reasoning is that developers start building around hardware most players will never own.

Worth remembering here: the 90 series was never purely a gaming card to begin with. It took over the spot once held by the Titan line, which always acted as a bridge between consumer and professional segments thanks to its larger video memory.

Nvidia marketed Titan cards through gaming, but most buyers picked them up for tasks heavier than rendering frames.

The same thing is happening with the 5090, except AI has replaced fp64 compute as the driving factor. 32GB of GDDR7 memory running at around 1800GB/s makes the card ideal for running large language models locally, and that's what's pushing the price up, not gaming.

Bandwidth matters more than capacity here, since every other consumer card is stuck around 1TB/s.

Plenty of people also pointed out the absurdity of what happened to the 80 series over the last few generations, it's become a pale shadow of the flagship. The top 80/80 Ti card used to trail the Titan by just a few percentage points, and a light overclock closed that gap entirely.

Now there's a massive gap between the 5080 and 5090, and the 5080 doesn't always catch up to the old 4090 even with a factory overclock.