Nvidia Has Been Overcharging You for Four Years and You Kept Paying
The PC gaming market spent 2025 pricing out the people who built it.
ReaperX
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21 April, 2026
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3 min read
The PC gaming market spent 2025 pricing out the people who built it. DDR5 memory increased 298% in three months. The RTX 5080 launched at £979. The RTX 5090 launched at £1,939. AMD’s RX 9070 XT, which launched at £599 MSRP and in independent benchmarks by Gamers Nexus trades performance with cards costing significantly more, sold out within hours of availability at every retailer.
The argument most often made in response to these prices is that enthusiast hardware has always been expensive and nobody is forcing anyone to buy the top tier. That argument is technically correct and practically useless, because the problem is not that the RTX 5090 exists at £1,939. The problem is that the entire stack has shifted upward and the mid-range has quietly disappeared.
The RTX 5070 launched at £539. Nvidia markets it as a mid-range card. The RTX 3070, which it implicitly replaces in the stack, launched in October 2020 at £469. That is a £70 nominal increase over five years in a period where UK inflation ran at over 20% cumulatively. On paper, barely any movement. In practice, £539 in 2026 is meaningfully more expensive than £469 in 2020, and the performance ceiling for what that money buys has not scaled proportionally once you account for what a card in that price range was expected to do five years ago.
Going, going, gone…
Meanwhile, the definition of “mid-range” has moved upward by several hundred pounds without the label changing. A card in the £350 range three years ago delivered a credible 1440p experience. Today that same money buys a card that will struggle at 1440p in two years and already trails in ray tracing at any resolution. The category name stayed the same. The expectations attached to it changed.
The framing that this is exclusively an AI problem is popular and partially accurate. Nvidia’s data centre GPU revenue dwarfs its gaming division. The company has less incentive to compete aggressively on gaming price when enterprise customers will pay whatever is asked for H100s and H200s. But that framing lets Nvidia off the hook for decisions that are about margin protection, not supply constraints. The RTX 5090 exists at £1,939 because the RTX 4090 sold at £1,599 and enough people bought it to prove the market would tolerate the number. Each generation, Nvidia tests a higher ceiling. Each generation, enough of the enthusiast base validates it.
AMD
AMD’s RX 9070 XT is the first genuinely competitive response in two years. At its MSRP of £599, Gamers Nexus benchmarks show it trading blows with Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti in rasterised performance at 1440p while costing significantly less than that card. That is a real value proposition. Whether AMD can keep it in stock, follow it with competitive products across the stack, and sustain the pressure over multiple generations is the only question that matters for PC hardware pricing in the next 18 months.
The Skill Issue is this: the enthusiast PC market tolerated Nvidia’s pricing strategy for long enough that Nvidia concluded it would tolerate anything. The correction, if it comes, will not come from Nvidia reconsidering its approach. It will come from AMD delivering competitive performance consistently enough that Nvidia loses the pricing freedom that market dominance provides.
The audience that kept buying £1,599 flagships funded the £1,939 one. That is not Nvidia’s fault. It is a consequence of the market choosing to pay.