A new leak from tech YouTuber der8auer claims that Nvidia is ending a program dubbed “OPP”, purportedly an incentive scheme used by Nvidia to ensure that at least some of its graphics cards were sold to consumers at MSRP by AIBs like Asus and others.
By way of historical background, the creator said in his YouTube video that Nvidia’s GPUs were previously being sold for way above the suggested retail price for the last few generations, and consumers were starting to notice and complain about it. So, the company instituted the OPP program, which, according to de8auer’s sources, is some sort of cash back for participating AIB partners. Although the techtuber does not know what OPP stands for, this is how it allegedly works: board partners sell some models at MSRP and then report that back to Nvidia, after which the GPU manufacturer would give them a rebate on the cost of the chip and the memory of that particular GPU they sold.
According to der8auer’s leak, Nvidia apparently stopped this program a few days ago. The sources did not say the reason behind the move, although it is easy to surmise that it’s caused by the ongoing memory crisis. We’ve reached out to Nvidia for comment. There were rumors late last year that the company no longer bundled VRAM with the GPU chips that board partners ordered, but Nvidia refuted this at CES, telling HardwareLuxx [machine translated], “No changes on how Nvidia is handling the memory allocation.”
If the OPP program is indeed real, it seems that the continuous increase in memory pricing is making it difficult even for Team Green, with its record revenues fueled by the boom in AI infrastructure build-out, to sustain the GPU and memory subsidy that allows board partners to at least sell some models at MSRP.
RTX 5070 Ti is not end-of-life, but expect limited supply anyway
Aside from the end of the “OPP,” der8auer also touched on the recent RTX 5070 Ti news. Another YouTube channel, Hardware Unboxed, was told by an Asus representative that the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB have been discontinued or marked as end-of-life (EOL). Asus refuted this a few hours later, saying that “Certain media may have received incomplete information from an Asus PR representative regarding these products,” and that “Asus has no plans to stop selling these models.”
However, industry sources reportedly told the tech tuber that Nvidia is prioritizing the RTX 5080 over the RTX 5070 Ti for its GB 203 supply. Both GPU models use the same chip, but since the GB 203 has a high yield rate, it’s been rumored that the GPU manufacturer wants to maximize its profits and prioritize the more expensive RTX 5080. Because of this, some say that the supply for the 5070 Ti will be heavily cut and that it’s going to be shifted towards the 5080.
Nevertheless, that does not mean we expect to see RTX 5080 prices to drop. In fact, the opposite has been true in recent days, with prices for different RTX 5080 models from various AIBs showing an increasing trend on Amazon. And with demand for both memory and AI chips remaining strong, we don’t expect gamers and their wallets to get a reprieve anytime soon.
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