Three days ago we covered the report that NVIDIA is discontinuing the RTX 5090 and reserving the GB202 die for its professional cards. We said it traced to one leaker’s post, that this was not a buying signal, and that we would say so here either way once it moved.

It has not moved. Here is the state of it, because r/comfyui spent today asking which card to buy instead.

What has not happened

NVIDIA has not said anything. Reporting as of yesterday notes no end of production date and no statement, and the company’s own GeForce product page still lists the RTX 5090 as current. Tom’s Hardware asked and got no reply, which is normal, because NVIDIA does not comment on rumours as a rule.

That absence is not proof the story is wrong. It is the reason it should still be labelled a rumour three days in.

The second source

A second leaker, posting as Zed__Wang, has been cited as backing the claim. That reads as independent corroboration, and it may not be.

At least one outlet covering this says MEGAsizeGPU, the origin of the original post, posts under the handle Zed__Wang. If that is right, the two sources are one person and the story has not actually been confirmed by anybody. We are reporting that as something the coverage says rather than something we have established, because we cannot verify who runs which account, and it is possible they are two people who agree.

Underneath both is a factory notice relayed secondhand by a third leaker. The factory is not named, and the line everyone is quoting is not a quote from NVIDIA.

So the evidence chain is a secondhand message from an unnamed source, repeated by one or two accounts, reported by many outlets. The volume of coverage is doing the work that a second source would normally do.

There is precedent for this kind of story being wrong. NVIDIA and Asus denied a similar claim about 16 GB models in January, and when Founders Edition cards were delisted and declared end of life, NVIDIA stated outright that they remained in production.

People are deciding anyway

The thread on r/comfyui today is somebody asking what to buy now that the 5090 is discontinued, phrased as settled fact. That is how this works, and it is not that poster’s fault. By the time a claim has been carried by eight outlets it reads like news.

If you are choosing a card for this work this week, the rumour should not be in the decision at all. The things that should be are the same as they were a month ago.

Buy the most VRAM you can afford, because that is the constraint that decides what you can run rather than how fast you run it. Work out the size of what you actually want to load before you choose, since a video model’s text encoder alone can be most of a mid range card. And if the answer is that nothing affordable fits, the hourly rental arithmetic has not changed either, and at current prices it comes out ahead for most people.

Panic contributes nothing to any of that. Neither does buying a 24 GB card today to get ahead of a 32 GB card that is still on sale.

What would settle it

A statement from NVIDIA. A change to that product page. A named board partner on the record. Or the simplest signal of all, which anybody can watch without trusting a leaker: whether restocks actually thin out over the next few weeks.

If any of those arrive we will write it up, including the version where the leak was right all along and we spent two notes being careful about a true story. Careful is the cheaper error.

A daily note from our news radar. The week gets the full treatment in the DIY AI Brief every Monday.