Nvidia launched its Blackwell RTX 5000 gaming graphics cards in 2025 with severe early problems including stock shortages that led to lottery systems at retailers, a hardware defect affecting approximately 0.5% of RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti units with missing rendering pipelines, and widespread driver bugs causing crashes and system failures.
Despite the troubled rollout, the chipmaker maintained its gaming GPU dominance with 92% discrete graphics card market share by Q3 and reached a historic $5 trillion valuation in October, driven primarily by AI chip demand.
The success of DLSS 4 technology with improved upscaling and frame generation helped Blackwell GPUs capture 7.5% of Steam's gaming PC install base by November, though concerns persist about VRAM limitations on mid-range models and rumors that Nvidia may prioritize lucrative AI products over gaming hardware in 2026.
