Flying to QuakeCon to buy an RTX 5090 at MSRP is genuinely cheaper than buying one online

Nvidia is selling RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Founders Edition cards at MSRP through its Verified Priority Access IRL booth at QuakeCon 2025 in Dallas — and thanks to absurd scalper pricing, flying from the UK to buy one there actually works out cheaper than ordering online.

The cheapest RTX 5090 available online right now sits at around $4,500 / £3,499. The MSRP is $1,999. A round-trip flight from the UK to Dallas runs about $1,428, QuakeCon admission is $16.50, and the total comes to roughly $3,443 / £2,556 — still a lot, but genuinely less than what scalpers are charging. The catch: the booth only stocks a limited number of GPUs per day, so you could survive a 19-hour flight with a self-transfer and arrive to find nothing left but a pack of GeForce Trading Cards featuring 14 of GeForce's greatest gaming moments. There are also reports that Nvidia GPU prices could climb a further 30%, which makes the whole situation even grimmer.

Nvidia's 50-series launch has been plagued by supply issues and inflated street prices since day one. The RTX 5090 sits at the top of the stack as the company's most powerful consumer GPU, and demand has consistently outpaced supply, leaving scalpers to fill the gap at eye-watering markups. QuakeCon's MSRP booth access is a direct acknowledgment from Nvidia that retail pricing has completely broken down.

There are a couple of other ways to score a 50-series card at QuakeCon without opening your wallet quite so wide. Nvidia is giving away an RTX 5070 Founders Edition to the top player in its Quake III Arena RTX Remix and DOOM: The Dark Ages — Revelations challenges, and winners of the QuakeCon Mod Contest also walk away with an RTX 50-series GPU. So the options are: fly to Dallas, get very good at Quake, or build an impressive mod. None of them are exactly straightforward.