If August was rough on GPU pricing, September made it worse. The month also brought the ending to GTA 6’s leak saga, a genuine hardware safety scare, and one of the year’s best releases finally hitting 1.0. Here’s everything worth knowing.
GPU Prices: From Bad to Genuinely Alarming
The GPU market went from expensive to borderline absurd this month. Tracking from Newegg showed RTX 50-series cards climbing as much as 39-41 percent since June, with the RTX 5090 crossing $5,000 at retail and, in the worst third-party listings, touching $6,000 to as high as $9,000, more than 4.5 times its original $1,999 MSRP. Official retailers spent much of the month out of stock entirely. Separate tracking from Tom’s Hardware and other outlets put the RTX 5090’s more typical real-world price closer to $4,300-$4,700 depending on the source and date, but the direction was the same everywhere: up, with no sign of stopping.
AMD joined in on September 17, announcing its own roughly 10 percent price hike across GPUs, chipsets, and possibly CPUs. The root cause remains the same one we’ve been tracking since August: GDDR7 and DRAM memory costs climbing as AI data centers absorb the bulk of global memory supply, not a shortage of the GPU chips themselves.
There’s a real update to our standing advice here, too. Reports throughout September suggested Nvidia’s rumored RTX 50 Super refresh, previously expected in early 2027, has effectively gone quiet, likely for the same memory-cost reasons driving everything else. Separately, some reporting now points to the full RTX 60 successor generation being delayed all the way to 2028. If you’ve been holding out for a “wait a few more months” answer, the honest one right now is that the wait may be longer than previously expected. Nvidia did briefly sell Founders Edition RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 cards at original MSRP again, but only in person at PAX West on September 5-6, through a giveaway-style “Verified Priority Access” program, not a real retail channel anyone can count on.
On the safety side, a widely shared report from Hardware Unboxed showed an RTX 5090 power connector melting during DLSS 5 testing, with the cable reportedly reaching 175°C and power draw spiking past 600W. If you’re running a 5090, it’s worth double-checking your power cable seating and not treating this as a one-off.
GTA 6’s Leak Saga Finally Wound Down
August ended with Cyberleek, the leaker behind weeks of GTA 6 gameplay footage, cashing out on a memecoin scheme after framing the whole thing as consumer protest. September brought the actual numbers into focus and closed the loop on Take-Two’s legal response: the combined cash-out is now estimated at roughly $270,000, about $146,000 in wrapped SOL plus another $125,000 from selling accumulated creator-fee tokens.
On the legal side, Take-Two shifted strategy on September 3. Having reportedly identified two Discord accounts linked to the leaks, the company filed a sealed subpoena rather than a public one, specifically to avoid tipping off the suspects before they could delete evidence, and dropped its earlier YouTube-directed subpoena in the process, a sign the investigation had moved in a different direction. As of the most recent reporting, no arrest or official identification of Cyberleek has been confirmed. Rockstar also published a new official video captured entirely from in-game PS5 footage, its own answer to weeks of unofficial leaks.
The facts that matter most for PC players remain unchanged: GTA 6 launches November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S only, still with no PC version or release window announced.
The Witcher 3: Remastered Actually Shipped
After being teased at Gamescom, The Witcher 3: Remastered launched right on schedule September 29, as a free upgrade for existing owners across Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2. The remaster brings overhauled combat, updated visuals, and improved monster AI to a game that’s now sold more than 90 million copies across the whole Witcher series as of this month.
Valheim Hit 1.0
After years in early access, Valheim officially launched its full 1.0 version on September 9, landing across PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, and Switch 2 simultaneously, and immediately scoring a 90 on Metacritic. If you’ve been waiting for the “finished” version before jumping in, this was the month to do it.
Steam Account Security Got a Documentation Refresh
Valve updated its official Scam FAQ pages between September 8 and 14, formally documenting the social engineering tactics that have been making the rounds: fake “vote for my team” tournament links, phony ban-appeal pages impersonating Steam staff, and impersonators reaching out through Steam Chat or Discord claiming to be Valve support. The core reminder hasn’t changed: Steam Support communicates only through email and its ticket portal, never through chat or Discord. Separately, a Steam client update this month made it possible to switch accounts directly while the client is still running, worth knowing so a quick account swap on a shared PC doesn’t get mistaken for something more concerning.
Coming Out of September
With RTX 50 Super rumors quiet and RTX 60 reportedly pushed to 2028, the “wait it out” advice for a GPU upgrade just got a longer runway attached to it. Tokyo Game Show wrapped up its longest-ever five-day run this month, and Blizzcon returned September 12-13 in Anaheim, both likely to keep generating PC-relevant news into October.