Nvidia has made three Founder's Edition cards this generation: the RTX 5070 FE, 5080 FE, and 5090 FE — the latter two of which were delisted from its website yesterday. This sudden removal sparked speculation over a possible inventory clearance in order to make room for the long-rumored RTX 50 Super series. The community hypothesized these cards had reached EOL. However, today, Nvidia has dispelled this notion outright:
"GeForce RTX 50 series Founders Editions continue to be in production. They are limited edition products so, from time to time, go out of stock on our website and return when back in stock." — Nvidia spokesperson to Tom's Hardware.
The rumors started over the absence of the RTX 5080 FE and RTX 5090 FE from Nvidia's online store. Generally, the chipmaker simply updates the cards' status to "Out of Stock" to reflect their availability. Completely taking them down gave people reason to run the rumor mills and directly connect this to a potentially forthcoming launch for the 50 Super series GPUs. That in of itself is a rumor as there has been no confirmation at all for such a release.
We've seen rumblings of a mid-cycle refresh for Blackwell gaming cards for months, but Nvidia has not even hinted at a launch. Moreover, the company's partners would've been prepping for it if it were actually happening anytime soon, and such news would've likely leaked by now. Therefore, the FE cards' delisting can be looked at as more of a coincidence; it just happened to be the perfect catalyst to stir the pot at the right time. Currently, we don't know when the RTX 50 Super series will come out.
It's also interesting how Nvidia refers to Founder's Edition GPUs as "limited edition products" when they've never been marketed as such. Are they limited by supply? Absolutely. But they're reference designs meant to be sold on a large scale so the clarification is certainly appreciated. At the moment, only the RTX 5070 FE is listed on Nvidia's website (at MSRP), there's no saying when the other SKUs will be back in stock. Rest assured, if you're a fan of the Founder's Edition, it's not being discontinued.
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