RTX 5090 Prices Explode, DLSS 5 Power Draw Raises Concerns, and NVIDIA Adds CPU Monitoring

The GPU market is becoming increasingly difficult for PC gamers to ignore. The RTX 5090 is now selling for more than €5,200 in Germany, DLSS 5 is pushing power consumption sharply higher in some workloads, and NVIDIA has quietly added CPU monitoring to its official NVIDIA App.

Each story is different, but together they highlight the same reality: high-end PC hardware is becoming more complicated and more expensive, while software is taking on a larger role in how that hardware is used.

RTX 5090 Hits €5,249 in Germany as Prices Approach Three Times MSRP

The GeForce RTX 5090 has reached another absurd price point in Germany. According to German hardware outlet PCGamesHardware, the cheapest RTX 5090 currently available through its price comparison system costs €5,249, with no listings below €5,200. The card in question is Gigabyte's RTX 5090 Gaming OC.

That is more than two and a half times NVIDIA's original German MSRP of €2,099. At launch, the official price was already extremely high for a consumer graphics card, but today's retail market makes the MSRP increasingly irrelevant because cards are rarely available anywhere close to it.

The situation is especially frustrating because the RTX 5090 is supposed to be NVIDIA's flagship gaming GPU rather than a professional accelerator. Yet demand from AI and compute workloads is putting additional pressure on high-end memory and GPU supply, while the 5090's 32GB of GDDR7 makes it particularly attractive for memory-intensive workloads.

That leaves gamers with an uncomfortable choice. Some are simply keeping their existing graphics cards and waiting for prices to normalize. Others are moving down to the RTX 5080, which offers substantially lower specifications but is available for a fraction of the price.

The difference is difficult to ignore. Paying more than €5,000 for one graphics card is no longer just a premium purchase. At that level, the RTX 5090 costs enough to fund an entire high-end gaming PC, which makes the current market increasingly difficult to justify from a purely gaming perspective.

The fact that Germany's cheapest RTX 5090 is now sitting above €5,200 also means the card is getting dangerously close to three times its launch price.

RTX 4090 Undervolting Cuts DLSS 5 Power Draw by 47W

While the RTX 5090 is dealing with an extreme price problem, NVIDIA's older RTX 4090 is revealing another issue with the company's latest graphics technology: power consumption.

One RTX 4090 user tested DLSS 5's neural rendering with and without an undervolt and found that reducing the GPU voltage could cut power consumption by roughly 40–50W while keeping performance almost unchanged.

In Hogwarts Legacy, the RTX 4090 reportedly consumed around 435W with DLSS 5 and MFG x4 enabled. After undervolting, consumption dropped to approximately 388W, a reduction of 47W, while reported performance remained at about 175 FPS. Without Multi Frame Generation, power consumption fell from roughly 426W to 387W while performance went from 51 FPS to 52 FPS.

The same user also reported a similar result in Cyberpunk 2077, with power consumption dropping from roughly 420W to 386W.

It is an impressive result, although it should not be treated as a guaranteed result for every RTX 4090. The numbers come from one user's particular card and undervolt settings, and other GPUs can behave differently depending on silicon quality, clocks and voltage curves.

Still, the experiment shows why undervolting remains attractive on high-end GPUs. Instead of simply lowering the graphics settings or disabling DLSS 5, users can potentially find a more efficient voltage-frequency curve and reduce heat, fan noise and overall power draw at the same time.

There is also a hardware angle to the discussion because extremely high GPU power consumption places greater demands on the power delivery system. Recent reports have raised concerns about high-power operation and 16-pin connector temperatures, although an undervolt should not be considered a universal fix for connector or cabling problems.

The interesting part is that the solution in this particular case came from tuning the GPU rather than turning off the new feature.

NVIDIA App Quietly Adds Real-Time CPU Monitoring

NVIDIA is also making a smaller but useful change on the software side. A recent NVIDIA App update has added CPU temperature, CPU clock speed and CPU power consumption to the application's in-game statistics overlay.

The feature was discovered by users after the recent update rather than being promoted as one of the headline additions. NVIDIA's current overlay can now display CPU statistics alongside existing GPU, FPS and DLSS information.

The new CPU temperature option appears in the customizable Statistics view. At present, temperature is shown as an overall CPU reading rather than detailed per-core information, while CPU clock speed and power consumption can also be displayed during gameplay.

For ordinary gamers, that could eliminate the need to launch another monitoring program just to check whether the processor is overheating or running at an unexpectedly low frequency.

NVIDIA's solution is still much less detailed than dedicated tools such as MSI Afterburner, RTSS and HWiNFO. Users have already asked for features including per-core CPU utilization, system memory and VRAM usage, as well as frame-time graphs.

Interestingly, the CPU monitoring additions were not prominently listed in the NVIDIA App 11.0.9 release notes. The documented changes focused on DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, per-application Resizable BAR controls and other smaller interface and driver-setting updates.

Taken together, these three developments show just how different the PC hardware landscape looks at the high end right now. The RTX 5090 is becoming prohibitively expensive, new rendering technologies can come with surprisingly high power requirements, and NVIDIA's software is increasingly becoming part of the hardware-management experience.

For gamers, the best graphics card is no longer simply the one with the highest benchmark number. Price, power consumption, thermals and software features are all becoming part of the equation—and in 2026, those factors can matter almost as much as raw performance.