Here’s how much Nvidia GPUs cost in 2006 compared to 2006. 2026

Earlier this month, you probably heard the news that some retailers were selling the latest Nvidia GPU for 10 times the price of a PlayStation 5 Pro. The Nvidia RTX 5090, Nvidia’s current flagship graphics card, was originally released in 2025 for $1,999, but now sells for between $9,000 and $14,000, depending on the model. To be fair, none of these GPUs are Founders Edition graphics cards, but variations of the basic schematics modified by companies like ASUS and Gigabyte with improved capabilities. Plus, you can always buy Nvidia’s cheaper GPU options, which, while less powerful, generally cost less than $1,000. Almost makes you appreciate how expensive GPUs were twenty years ago.

Around the same time, in 2006, Nvidia announced and then released the next wave of GeForce 7 GPUs. Not GTX or RTX, just plain old GeForce. These included the GeForce 7900 GS and 7950 GT, but those weren’t the company’s only offerings. Nvidia also sold high-end cards such as the GeForce 7950 GX2 and 7900 GTX that year. When Nvidia announced the 7900 GS and 7950 GT graphics cards, it listed price ranges of $199 to $249 for the former and $299 to $349 for the latter. Meanwhile, the 7950 GX 2 cost between $535 and $650, while the 7900 GTX ranged between $450 and $500.

It’s no two ways about it: GPU prices have increased significantly over the past 20 years. Then again, their power has also increased exponentially. The Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 only had a clock speed of 500 MHz and 1 GB of memory. Meanwhile, the Founders Editions of the RTX 5090 have a clock speed of 2.01 GHz and 32 GB of memory, which is four times the clock speed and 32 times the memory. To really put this into perspective, we need visual aids. The RTX 5090 powers games such as “Crimson Desert,” Cyberpunk 2077,” and “Black Myth: Wukong.” Meanwhile, the GeForce 7950 GX2 was designed for titles like the original “BioShock”, “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” (not the remastered) and the vanilla version “World of Warcraft”. Comparing the two GPUs like “night and day” would be the understatement of the century.

If we’re honest, the out-of-pocket cost of a GPU barely outweighs the value of what you get for the price you pay. Look no further than the 7950 GX2, which might as well have been this year’s flagship (not counting dual- or quad-GPU models like the Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad-SLI). Accounting for inflation (using the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator), this graphics card would range between $888 and $1,079 today. That’s pretty much what you get today for the RTX 5070 – or a 5080 at launch. If it weren’t for the ongoing shortage of components needed to make GPUs (and RAM), we wouldn’t be surprised if the value of GPUs exceeded their cost.