The new Blackwell card, and it's absolutely my favourite of the lot. It's got that Multi Frame Gen good stuff, runs cool and quiet, and has an absolute ton of easy overclocking headroom.
Pretty much every manufacturer on the planet is looking to cash in on the scarcity of the RTX 50-series
But it's a real GPU screwjob for PC gamers when it comes to the pricing you're going to find out at retail.
Some $749 GPUs might be visible for a couple of picoseconds, but the vast majority of the RTX 5070 Ti cards you're going to see around launch will be priced waaaaaay higher. I had hoped the earlier listing prices we'd seen were mistakes or placeholders, but no, pretty much every manufacturer on the planet is looking to cash in on the scarcity of the RTX 50-series by putting an offensively high price on this third-tier graphics card.
The Asus' Prime card is going to be well over MSRP, and it's TUF Gaming SKU will be north of $900, too.
Yet, at first blush the RTX 5070 Ti seemed like a moderately consumer-friendly graphics card. It was nominally $50 cheaper than the RTX 5080.
As it's based on the same GB203 GPU, however, it's possible to overclock the hell out of the card and bring it within single digit percentage points of the gaming performance of the $999 RTX 5090.
So long as you don't mind spending ten minutes with MSI Afterburner you'll get the sorts of frame rates that absolutely convince me there's no commensurate gaming benefit to spending another $250-odd on an RTX 5080. Of course that card can overclock, too, but since the paper-thin launch, prices for those cards have been stupidly high, not least because the scalpers are out in force again.
Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
But sadly, that is only going to happen again, severely tarnishing the launch of the RTX 5070 Ti with absurdly high prices. These aren't the retailers alone cashing in on their low stock allocations, either, these are set prices from the manufacturers themselves. Which means it might get even worse than we've seen so far. I can almost guarantee there will be $1,000+ RTX 5070 Ti SKUs on the shelves.
Though I don't know of any real solution; it is, after all, just cold capitalism and the laws of supply and demand. A commodity is scarce, so the market sets the price, no matter what Nvidia might have picked as a base price for the card. In a way, you can't blame companies for trying to get the most money out of limited stock, but it's the levels they're going to which I find offensive.
Maybe if there was a Founders Edition for the RTX 5070 Ti that would have helped, but FE stock would have surely sold out as quick as the few MSRP cards going on sale today.
As with the pandemic-based GPU crisis, everybody in the chain is looking greedily at the opportunity to squeeze their own bit of extra cash from the new cards—from the manufacturers, to the retailers, to the scalpers. And who is it that really pays the price? PC gamers, always.
But don't. Just don't. Please, do not pay the price. That's all I ask.
