GPU deals are basically dead this month — here's the short list of stuff still worth buying

PC Gamer has been tracking graphics card prices every week for exactly a year now, and their own verdict, published this month, is blunt: it's never been worse. The RTX 5090 is up roughly 83% since they started watching in August 2025. That's not an isolated card, either — Newegg-tracked medians show nearly every RTX 50-series card jumping again in just the last two months. I went through what actually moved and by how much, so you know where a 'deal' this month is real and where it's just a smaller markup.

The damage, card by card

Every one of those numbers traces back to the same root cause: GDDR7 memory costs climbing across the board, with board partners passing it straight to retail. It's not a scalping story and it's not a single-card story — it's a memory story, and it's hitting the cards with the most VRAM chips per board hardest. That's exactly why the 16GB 5060 Ti got hurt worse than the 12GB 5070 in percentage terms, even though it's the cheaper card.

What's still actually a fair price

AMD and Intel didn't dodge the memory shortage — they use the same GDDR6/GDDR7 supply chain everyone else does — but neither has spiked anywhere near Nvidia's numbers this cycle. Intel's Arc B580 is selling for roughly $290-310, up from a $249 launch price almost two years ago — call it 20% total, spread across nearly two years, versus Nvidia doing 36-39% in eight weeks. AMD's 16GB RX 9060 XT has moved from a $349 launch to around $423, about 21% up since mid-2025. Neither is technically "on sale." Both are just... not spiking.

Cards I'd skip entirely this month

Why this is happening now, and when it might ease

This is a component shortage, not a marketing decision, which means nobody — Nvidia included — can promise a date it ends. Multiple outlets tracking Newegg data independently landed on similar percentage jumps in the same two-week window, which tells me this is a genuine supply signal, not one retailer repricing opportunistically. PC Gamer's own read, after a full year of weekly tracking, was that most of the lineup had actually stabilized near MSRP for stretches this year before this specific spike — so the market isn't permanently broken, it's that memory got expensive again, fast.

I've watched this market long enough to know 'wait it out' isn't satisfying advice, but it's the honest one this month. Nothing in Nvidia's lineup right now is priced like a deal — it's priced like a shortage. If your build genuinely can't wait, buy the card that fits your workload and stop refreshing tracker pages hoping for a better number; if it can wait, go read what's actually worth building around instead, and check back once GDDR7 supply catches up.