Nvidia returns to selling Founder’s Edition RTX 50-series GPUs at MSRP in person at PAX West — Verified Priority Access has RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 at list price

PAX West is underway at the Seattle Convention Center in Seattle, Washington, and Nvidia is offering a selection of its Founder’s Edition GPUs at MSRP. Nvidia has RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 models available while supplies last, along with packs of GeForce Trading Cards Series 1. Jacob Freeman, GeForce Evangelist at Nvidia, shared the announcement on X, telling interested gamers to “come find me” if they want a GPU.

Nvidia’s Verified Priority Access (VPA) is a lottery program for Founder’s Edition cards that the company launched in 2022 for RTX 40-series GPUs. It returned in 2025 for RTX 50-series GPUs, and although you can still sign up for the program online, Nvidia has seemingly shifted to offering MSRP GPUs during live events. Last month, the company did something similar at QuakeCon in Austin, Texas.

Over the past month, we’ve seen a sharp rise in the price of Nvidia’s highest-end graphics cards in our GPU price tracker, with the $1,999 RTX 5090 now regularly listed for above $5,000. The RTX 5090 has been a particular flashpoint due to its plentiful 32GB of GDDR7 memory, making it ideal not only for flagship gaming performance but also (relatively) low-cost local AI inference.

Earlier this month, however, we saw increases as large as 39% in median list price for RTX 50-series GPUs, following a series of reports about regional price increases outside of the U.S. The increases hit the middle of Nvidia’s Blackwell stack the hardest, with the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB jumping by 29% and RTX 5070 jumping by 36%.

The RTX 5090 has continued to rise in price, even after the hike we saw early last month. At the time, the median price was $4,699.99, but now, you’ll spend at least $5,000 on a GPU online. Deals, if you can call them that, are available on the RTX 5090 if you have a Micro Center nearby, with models going down as low as $4,200.

This week, Nvidia launched DLSS 5 for RTX 50-series GPUs in NBA 2K27, following a leaked DLL that allowed modders to get Neural Rendering operational in just about any game. Within days, the community got DLSS 5 operational on RTX 40-series GPUs, as well as older RTX 30-series GPUs, though performance was unplayable on the latter. Nvidia says it plans to bring DLSS 5 support to RTX 40-series GPUs at a later date.

Although Nvidia doesn’t have a booth at PAX West 2026, many of its partners do, including Starforge Systems, Razer, and Lenovo. Freeman says he’ll be posting updates on X on where and when attendees can find him.