GoKawiil
Tech News
Rising memory and silicon costs have pushed graphics card prices well above launch prices, with the Nvidia RTX 5070 now selling for over $800 despite its $549 launch price. This has led to advice that owners should consider reselling or repurposing older GPUs rather than discarding them, citing eBay listings where used cards like the RTX 3060 and even the decade-old GTX 1060 still fetch significant resale value.
Micro Center has changed the listing status of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 to 'Not Carried,' a classification indicating the retailer does not plan to restock the card, rather than a temporary out-of-stock label. Custom RTX 5090 models from partners like Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte remain listed on the site but are sold out at all physical stores, with the sole exception of a $11,000 Asus ROG 20th Anniversary bundle. The change follows recent rumors that Nvidia has halted production of the card.
On October 11, 1999, Nvidia shipped the GeForce 256, the first product it labeled a 'GPU,' featuring a hardware transform-and-lighting engine. Offloading graphics work from the CPU wasn't new—Commodore and 3dfx had done similar things earlier—but Nvidia coined and popularized the GPU term with this release. The card particularly benefited systems with weaker CPUs like low-end Celerons.
Nvidia announced an October update to DLSS 5 that doubles performance versus the current model, a 10x gain since March. The update shrinks the model to 118 million parameters, cuts 4K VRAM usage by 20%, and halves GPU overhead at similar image quality, boosting frame rates by up to 1.4x. The faster model debuts in NBA 2K27 on October 16, with Hogwarts Legacy support coming next month, alongside a new faster Performance Mode for Frame Generation on RTX 40 and 50 series GPUs.
A GitHub programmer built NvidiaWatch, a website that compiles Nvidia driver release notes and forum feedback to track the status of 462 reported driver bugs. The site gives each bug and each driver release its own page, showing fixed, open, and carried-over issues, plus a chart summarizing how many problems were resolved per update. The creator first shared the project in late September and posted an update on r/Nvidia this week.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates realistic lighting, shadows and reflections by tracing light rays, in contrast to older rasterization and screen-space reflection methods used in non-RT titles. According to Steam Hardware Survey data cited in the piece, NVIDIA's RTX 5070 is currently the most-used graphics card, indicating many PC gamers now own hardware capable of handling ray tracing. The author, who uses an RTX 5090 with DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation, says gamers on older cards like the RTX 3060 or Radeon RX 6600 XT should disable ray tracing and prioritize stable frame rates instead.
According to leaked factory notices cited by hardware leakers @hongxing2020 and @Zed__Wang, Nvidia has stopped producing GB202 chips for consumer RTX 5090 graphics cards, including Chinese 'D' variants. The notice claims the RTX 5080 24GB will become the new top consumer GeForce model, with the RTX 5080 16GB being discontinued. Nvidia has not confirmed the claim and typically does not comment on rumors.
For more than twenty years, home consoles relied on dedicated, fixed-function graphics chips rather than general-purpose processors. The NES, for instance, used the Ricoh 2C02 Picture Processing Unit, which could not run code but instead converted cartridge tile art and memory lookup tables into a TV signal line by line, with a hard cap of eight sprites per scanline causing visible flicker in games like Super Mario Bros. This era ended in November 2001 when Microsoft released the original Xbox, built around an Intel Pentium III CPU and an NVIDIA graphics chip derived from the GeForce 3, the first GPU to support programmable pixel and vertex shaders.
Nvidia has pushed out a special software security update for GeForce GPUs from the 700, 900 and 10 series, including Titan and MX notebook variants, that no longer receive regular Game Ready Driver support. The company says the update fixes multiple issues with potential security impacts, though it has not detailed the specific vulnerabilities.
NVIDIA's RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition, which the company calls its most powerful desktop GPU, now carries a US price of $16,000. That's up sharply from its $8,565 launch price and its earlier $13,250 tag, though NVIDIA has not explained the reason for the increase. The card sits above the consumer-focused RTX 5090 and is aimed at professional users rather than gamers.
Walmart is selling a refreshed HP Omen 35L desktop with Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti GPU, an Intel Core i7-14700F CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD for $1,899.99. The same configuration lists for $3,639.99 on HP's own site, making the Walmart price over $1,700 cheaper.
Korean outlet QuasarZone tested the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition running Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with DLSS 5 enabled, recording peak power draw near 650W and a 16-pin (12VHPWR) connector temperature of 91.7 degrees Celsius, higher than the GPU die itself. The RTX 5080 also showed a temperature rise with DLSS 5 on, though smaller in magnitude than the 5090's.