Luckily I built my PC earlier this year during May-June… after like 13 years. Scared looking at the RAM prices now. Really sympathise with people currently building their PCs.
That being said, at that time I din’t have the budget to buy a GPU I wanted (RTX 5070 Ti 16GB) so got a RTX 3060 12GB in a flipkart sale.
After nvidia announced the super line up with more memory, I thought I would buy the RTX 5070 Ti Super 24GB later in 2026 as more VRAM would be better for local AI.
Now after this memory chips shortages and price spikes it has become doubtful whether nvidia would release their super models with more memory or charge more price. (any updates on this news?)
As GPU prices are also set to increase in 2026 is it prudent to buy the 5070 Ti now or just wait and watch without FOMOing. Can’t decide on this. So please chime in on this folks.
Currently, I mostly just play one game BF6 on my 1440p monitor on low settings and occasionally use some local AI models just to tinker around (in comfyui, lmstudio, n8n etc). No serious workflow.
This price rise is gonna become worse by the day. So buying 5070Ti now is the best advice I can give if the price rise hasnt occurred till now for these GPUs. Okay.
If you are happy with your current performance and you willing to wait untill late 2026 then I would say you should wait for 5070ti super( assuming they are not cancelling the launch, rumours are there that it can get cancelled). You are building your pc after very long so I don’t want to you have regrets later for not waiting.
I don’t think GPU prices will be affected by more than 10-20%. The demand will be low as people will refrain from building new systems due to insane memory prices.
No late 2026 this price rise will continue till 2028 as said by industry biggies and analysts. They are saying until 2028 the prices will not stabilise.
Thats the slippery slope buddy, there will always be something better but we need to settle for something. OP had initially thought of getting 5070ti super so imo they should wait for it again considering that if it is going to launch, it will launch during CES 2026 that’s just next month. OP can make better decision then.
After some news digging I found out the following:
it looks like that there are credible sources that the RTX 5000 series Super cards are postponed to Q3/Q4 2026 and 6000 series is postponed to 2027 due to extreme DRAM shortage
this DRAM shortage is not going to get reduced anytime soon as AI spending is only increasing exponentially and is only limited by power availability. so thank our dismal power infrastructure (in US and elsewhere) for slowing out the AI mad rush else we would be seeing much bigger price increases. but not in China they have all the power they want.
the DRAM companies are also playing it smarter this time unlike previous cycles where they built out excessive capacities in response to such high demand and after that demand subsided they were left with glut of oversupply and falling prices. they are strategically planning to avoid such scenario this time and have also publicly announced their intention
Nvidia is not going to bundle DRAMs with their chips supplied to the OEMs so they have to find DRAMs themselves and get into contracts etc. this is also going to increase GPU pricing
so all OEMs have decided to increase GPU pricing from the next manufacturing batch in 2026
speculators expect this situation to last till 2028 or even 2029 depending on 2026 US midterms and 2028 elections results
and from keeping track of both AI news and macro developments, I came to this conclusions:
the AI infra build out is not stopping anytime sooner (as also said above). Trump is going to appoint a dovish Fed Chair by May 2026 and everyone is expecting steep interest rate cuts. this will pump in so much liquidity into the market and the results are obvious. so the AI bubble (?) has far far more room to inflate and if the AI productivity promises turn out to materialise even 50% the bubble can turn into real industrial revolution like transition event and sustain itself contrary to bubble burst predictions
TLDR everything is going to go much much higher
the tech biggies (most of the MAG7 esp. Tesla) are actively planning to build AI training infra using satellites in space to circumvent the local oppositions to building and terrestrial power constraints
contrary opinions:
the best antidote to higher prices is higher prices. as in people would just stop buying when prices are higher. but this time the companies don’t have that much of a problem if retail doesn’t buy as they have far more demand from AI than they can manufacture/supply. so the prices could remain higher for longer even if sales are low
the DRAM could correct much earlier that expected in 2026 but unlikely
any black swan event can derail all these overnight
after searching for good RTX 5070 Ti models I found out that they are pretty scarce. only the lower end models (like Colour, Zotac Solid Core/SFF etc) are available and at higher prices already. for eg. there are like 6 active listings of Zotac RTX Solid/OC and AMP Infinity/OC cards among all Tech online retailers in India and an equal amount of RTX 5080 models which are like 30 to 50k higher than 5070 Ti
typed this all in haste and some roller coaster of mixed emotions (as I hold tiny bag of tech stocks ), please excuse any typos, will correct later if needed.
AI demand is 10x gaming i think and only going to rise, so retail supply/demand doesn’t matter much anymore.
Whether this is sustainable, hard to say. Bubble like conditions can continue for years before they pop and its hard to say if its a bubble looking ahead, only in hindsight. Doesnt mean it wont pop next year either. They dont make enough money and fast depreciation of tech probably will make it worse. And all of this to get unreliable output. Ofc use cases will be there but it doesnt seem to be universally good to me.
Even Ram guys don’t know if demand will sustain else maybe they wouldnt have abandoned retail like this.
I have 3080 and play at 4k. I could do with an upgrade, but i dont like anything enough. 5070ti is barely 50% faster, not enough to play say path tracing at high refresh rates which is what i will wait for as i think next gen consoles will go for that. 16gb doesnt seem enough either, but now its unclear as next gen consoles might reduce memory requirements too.
5000 series also have power connector issues which i don’t accept. So that leaves me with 9070xt which is even slower at 40% faster. So i will wait for next couple of years and play older games, which anyway i prefer now.
That said, 9070xt at 70k isnt too bad for gaming for someone who needs it. But wont be a good option for AI. 5070ti seems to have gotten more expensive now, but there are some in 80s from gigabyte and galax in primeabgb. That seems to be the most logical option.
Just for AI i dunno if 3060 12gb to 5070 12gb will be worth it. For gaming, 3060 to 9070xt is a pretty good jump.
Maybe you can just use cloud computing for your tests ?? Dunno if they are economical but then you can use as per memory needs.
I really hope we dont come to a situation that only option to play games is consoles or cloud gaming. Fk that
and btw many of my shortlisted GPU listings (Zotac 5070 Ti and 5080 models) in Indian retailer websites have gone out of stock and some have increased prices by 10 to 15k!!
i will go out on a limb and say 3060 is a fairly decent card, if you can afford to wait for a year or 2, i’d say wait. dont let the marketting and big numbers get to you.
Have been very indecisive on this for some time now. wasted a lot of time. after considering a lot of things, just bought a new Zotac RTX 5060 Ti 16GB Amp card for 54k (some sites have already increased its price to 61k)
Didn’t want to pay 1.1L+ for the 5070 Ti Amp or 1.4L+ for the 5080 Amp. It is difficult to resell GPUs at this price point and at those prices it would be better to get the 4090 but there are no stocks of it or 3090 anywhere. Also I’m able to play only a few hours per week and with the BF6 being CPU heavy, the 5060 Ti is good enough for me currently esp. to tide over any current GPU price hike for the foreseeable future.
if any good deal comes up for new/used >16GB VRAM GPU next year, I might get on it.
), please excuse any typos, will correct later if needed.
