Some gamers are already camping out during one of the coldest times in the year to get their hands on a $2,000 graphics card.

NVIDIA just warned consumers that it might be pretty difficult for gamers to get their hands on its upcoming high-end RTX 5090 and 5080 graphics cards. The company says it expects “significant demand” for the cards and that “stock-outs may happen.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card is exceptionally powerful but forbiddingly expensive. (You could build a complete RTX 5080-based gaming PC for the money.) But this top-tier GPU lives on a whole other planet of performance.

The Nvidia RTX 5080 cannot match up to the raw processing of a RTX 5080, but with multi frame gen it's a card you can't ignore.

It’s disappointing to see Nvidia has stuck with 16GB of VRAM on the RTX 5080. AMD’s RX 7900 XTX offers 24GB, and while the RTX 5080 delivers better performance for now, it may well hit video memory limits in 4K gaming in the future.

Is Nvidia's RTX 5080 really faster than the RTX 4090? See how this new card performs and whether it's worth upgrading from older models

Nvidia warns of 'significant demand' for the graphics cards, which go on sale early Thursday morning. Still, Nvidia says it'll be shipping more supplies to retailers every day.

Word from Nvidia about the supply of its flagship graphics cards appeared on its GeForce Forums. A forum administrator and Nvidia staff member who goes by Tim@NVIDIA wrote today, “We expect significant demand for the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 and believe stock-outs may happen.

Nvidia's GB202 graphics processing unit has a die size of 761.56 mm^2, which makes it one of the largest GPUs for client PCs ever produced. The graphics card model it powers — the GeForce RTX 5090 — also appears among the most expensive add-in boards ever.