The RTX 5070 is creeping ever closer to $1,000, and the mid-range PC gamer in me is in mourning

Upon reading that the RTX 5070 now comes in at $900 on average, it's hard to stay optimistic as a mid-range PC player. Yes, monstrous things are happening to Nvidia's proper top-end SKUs, and at this stage, I'm refusing to class the RTX 5090 as a real card people can buy. However, we've now sailed into a reality where middle-of-the-road cards cost almost as much as former flagships like the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and that's a travesty.

The admittedly morbid graphics card pricing figures come courtesy of Tom's Hardware, with a median GPU pricing chart suggesting the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 now costs 36% more at Newegg. FYI, that's compared to June 2026 versus now, and while its previous inflated $659.99 offended me to my bones, you're now looking at $899.99 as an average across every custom model.

Keep in mind this is the median RTX 5070 price, so it's supposed to reflect the typical price of the GPU when accounting for all the souped-up models. You can still grab a card for less than $900 theoretically, but you're more likely to encounter something in that price range than anything close to Nvidia's original $549 MSRP.

Yes, it's bad news for almost every other Nvidia GPU out there right now. If you're going by month-to-month, the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti are the least impacted, but both had already drifted way beyond their original MSRPs. The basic trend here is that every class model is stepping up in price to fill in for the model above it, with the RTX 5050 now sitting in the cost bracket occupied by the RTX 5060.

Again, that's if you ignore whatever nonsense the RTX 5090 is up to, as the GPU is now officially worth more than my car. The new median for the flagship is $4,700, and that would have got you two of the best gaming PCs not so long ago. This might feel like the new "normal", but I fully believe the takeaway here should be that the GPU market isn't functional right now, and it's not on you to navigate absurd prices.

I should note that this isn't an Nvidia-exclusive issue; AMD graphics cards like the Radeon RX 9070 currently cost well above MSRP, although you can still get that mid-range GPU for under $650. That doesn't change the fact that RAMageddon has taken the once vital 70-class realm of cards from everyday PC players, and lower-end 60-class cards are stepping in to take its place.

I've been building PCs since the start of the 2000s, and Nvidia's 70-class graphics cards quickly became my affordable go-to. The subsection still felt high-end, with my original EVGA GeForce GTX 470 pulling some serviceable 1080p moves even into the early 2010s, and I feel like the class reached its true affordable performance heights with the GeForce GTX 970, a card that cost me under $300 back in 2014.

The pricing situation that has actually been going on since before the current AI industry nonsense has eradicated that PC gaming experience. If you want comparable modern performance, you'll be paying way more, and that really upsets me as someone who played Dark Souls 2 and 3 with settings that felt generations beyond a PS4 on a 70-class GPU.

Yes, I get that GPU specs work differently now, as DLSS and AI upscaling shenanigans help lesser cards boost fps to otherwise unachievable heights. All of those tricks, provided you haven't deemed them "fake frames", will save you from the same minimum requirements woes as a decade ago, but they absolutely do have their limits, and we should have financial access to the real mid-range 70-class options that have been at the foundations of the PC gaming scene for years.

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