The current state of the GPU market
At this point in 2025’s graphics card market, the issue isn’t so much that mainstream cards like the 5060, 5070, or 9070 aren’t available but that they are rarely available for their stated retail price. This has always been an issue with AMD, Nvidia, and Intel’s board partners, who try to add things like fancy cooling, lighting, or marginal overclocks to justify raising the price. But MSRP cards are currently vanishingly rare, and it’s hard to know where the 9060 XT’s price will actually fall.
Using Newegg listings for cards that are in stock, Intel’s “$249” Arc B580 is available for $299 at best. There is one $299 RTX 5060 from Gigabyte available, but the rest of them cost at least $320. The $349 8GB version of the RTX 5060 Ti actually starts at $390, and the $429 version starts closer to $490 new. The $549 RTX 5070 is more like $600 or $610. The $549 RX 9070 starts at $650 instead, and the $599 RX 9070 XT at $720 or more.
You get the picture—you can buy a lot of graphics cards, but the actual prices are somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 to $100 more than they ought to be.
If you’re in the market for a GPU and you can actually get the 16GB version of the RX 9060 XT at $349, you should do it because it’s clearly better and more future-proof than anything else available at that price, and the 5060 Ti’s advantages are totally moot when it costs almost $150 more. But be aware of your other options and their actual costs if you can’t find anything at the advertised list price.
Conditionally great
Imagine a better world with me: Companies that design and manufacture graphics cards announce new products and reveal pricing for those products, and then it’s possible to go into a brick-and-mortar or online store and buy those products for the price that was originally announced. Wouldn’t that be nice?
But that’s not the world we live in, due to many factors: the death of Moore’s Law, inflation, tariffs and general economic uncertainty, and the fact that companies can make much more money selling GPUs as AI accelerators than they can selling similar silicon to people who play video games.
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