Well, my chances of being able to afford one in the current climate were slim anyway
Nvidia, AI-obsessives to the point of yassifying basketballers, are shifting production away from their top of the range RTX 5090 consumer graphics cards in favour of RTX Pro ones. That's according to a leaker with a solid track record when it comes to the company. If accurate, the move's the latest instance of a gaming tech firm turning away from regular PC owners to chase the more plentiful cash offered by hawking gear to GenAI developers and datacenters.
Leaker MEGAsizeGPU, who previously, accurately heralded Nvidia's willingness to mash both Ti and Super into a single GPU name, has asserted (via Digital Foundry) that supply of GB202 GPU dies is being directed to RTX Pro cards rather than 5090s going forwards.
As of writing, Nvidia haven't confirmed such a shift. The RTX Pro cards are part of the company's GPU range aimed at "accelerating professional AI, graphics, rendering, and compute workloads". "From breathtaking architectural and industrial design to advanced special effects, complex scientific visualizations, and AI tasks like fine-tuning large language models and running local AI assistants, the Nvidia RTX Pro platform is the heart of the world’s most powerful and efficient professional computing solutions," an overview of these cards on Nvidia's site reads. "And as AI agents take on more work, RTX Pro runs them locally and securely—automating repetitive tasks, compressing iteration cycles, and accelerating demanding enterprise workloads."
So, this would be another instance of the GenAI industry and its datacenters making it harder for regular consumers to get ahold of the gear they want. Prices of RAM, SSDs and graphics cards have been pushed through the roof thanks to chip makers prioritising making the hardware that AI firms are bending over backwards to hoover up en-masse, with this memory crisis looking set to rumble on for at least the next year. Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix have all been accused by a US lawsuit of worsening the crisis via price fixing.
With the situation still dire for the wallet of anyone trying to improve or even do some TLC on their setup, it's well worth checking out the efforts of our James and contributor Jon Martindale to provide useful advice that might help you get by during these trying times.