We’ve said before that it’s not a good time to buy a high-end graphics card. We expect new releases from Nvidia, AMD and Intel within the next couple of months. In fact, we’d be very surprised if we don’t have an RTX 5080 and 5090 launch in January.
However, you might be sitting here in early December thinking “I don’t care about what happens in January, I want the best graphics card I can buy today.” And that card would be the RTX 4090.
If you care about ray tracing, the differences are quite stark. With an RTX 4090, at 4K resolution, you get a playable 55 fps on the RTX 4090 and 103.9 fps at 2K resolution. However, there’s a huge step down on those frame rates when you use the next card down, the RTX 4080 Super.
There may be a huge difference when we finally see the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, but for now, the RTX 4090 is the leader. Unfortunately, the cards themselves are selling out like crazy.
When I started writing this article, I intended to include links to RTX 4090 cards that were available for $1,799 and $1,819 at Best Buy. By the time I’d written a couple of paragraphs, they were all sold out. You could probably still find an RTX 4090 for $2,300 or more, but that’s an insane price to pay.
Our advice: if you really want an RTX 4090 for your build, buy a prebuilt desktop with an RTX 4090 inside. Here are a few examples (while they last).
We are working hard to find the best computer deals for you this Cyber Monday. If you’re looking for more savings, check out our Cyber Monday Computer Hardware Deals Live blog for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals Live blog, Monitor Deals Live, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.
