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It’s official: Nvidia’s next generation of gaming graphics is here and, my friends, the GeForce RTX 50 series looks to be priced pretty attractively on paper. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced another 8 GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards at his CES 2025 keynote: four for desktops and four for laptops, all supporting a next-generation fourArray DLSS.
The same GPUs were announced for both form factors: The GeForce RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, and 5070. It was a big difference from AMD’s keynote, where RDNA 4 and the Radeon RX 9070 weren’t even mentioned despite press receiving a high-level briefing.
Let’s start with Nvidia’s highly anticipated desktop graphics cards, powered by Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture. They’re less expensive than expected, with lower costs than their predecessors. . . except for the RTX 5090Array, but there’s a reason for that.
I was convinced that the GeForce RTX 5090 would cost $2,500 or more based off the leaked specs. Well, Jensen didn’t really get into product level specs, but at $1,999, it’s a relative bargain for AI researchers, if not necessarily gamers. With 32GB of VRAM and a beefy 512-bit bus, paired with Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell GPU, this thing will be ferocious in gaming, but unparalleled in machine learning tasks if you can’t afford a pricey Nvidia enterprise-class card.
The topic is a long one: at $999, the RTX 5080 costs $200 less than the 4080 at launch (and the same value as the RTX 4080 Super). At $749 and $549, the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 charge $50 less than their predecessors (although, to be honest, I called the RTX 4070 Ti “hindered and incredibly expensive”). Best of All told, Jensen said the RTX 5070 offers RTX 4090-class functionality for about a third of the price.
Inside the new dual-fan “double flow through” Nvidia Founders Edition design, with an absolutely miniscule PCB.
NVIDIA
If this is true in gaming and not just AI workloads or benchmarks, it’s an exciting start to the next generation; However, keep in mind that those starting values for Nvidia’s revised Founders Edition may not reflect the same value seen in the traditional third generation. -products. party cards. Nvidia’s announcement message for the 50 series, released after the keynote, includes key points of high-level functionality for each desktop GPU, but only in full ray tracing and DLSS situations. Since we don’t have a tangible idea of the functionality benefits that DLSS 4 brings, take them with a bit of caution for now. However, it shows what is possible.
Nvidia claims that the RTX 5090 is “2x faster than the GeForce RTX 4090”, that the RTX 5080 is “twice as fast as the GeForce RTX 4080”, that the RTX 5070 is “2x faster than the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti” and that the RTX 5070 is as fast as the RTX 4090.
Again, expect to hit those peak levels only in fast-paced games and scenarios that feature Nvidia’s full suite of ray tracing and DLSS features. The RTX 5090 offers many more CUDA cores than the 4090, so it deserves to be a beast no matter what, while the lower-tier RTX 50 cards have more modest CUDA upgrades, so Blackwell’s architectural tweaks (and DLSS 4) possibly wants to be modified. do the heavy lifting if Nvidia plans to deliver big functionality improvements. We’ll see!
Look for RTX 50 series graphics cards to start hitting the market in some form in late January. Nvidia specified which cards would be released and when.
Nvidia usually releases desktop GPUs much earlier than their desktop counterparts, but with the RTX 50 series! Well, a little. They will be released in March, while the desk cards will be released this month, but Jensen revealed either one on stage.
Details were scant beyond what you see in the screenshot above. The GeForce RTX 5090 will be available in laptops starting at $2,899; the RTX 5080 in laptops starting at $2,199; the RTX 5070 Ti in laptops starting at $1,599; and the RTX 5070 in laptops starting at $1,299.
Pay close attention to the cited AI TOPs under the model numbers for both the laptop and desktop GPUs, though. Laptop graphics tend to be cut-down from their desktop cousins, and the AI TOPS suggests that’s the case with the RTX 50-series too. The RTX 5090 desktop card offers 3,400 AI TOPS while the laptop version hits 1,850 – about the same level as the desktop RTX 5080. (No surprise there, as the laptop 4090 is basically a desktop 4080 stuffed into a notebook.) The same trend continues down the laptop 50-series line.
Update: Nvidia’s GeForce online page provided more specs after the keynote and yes, my initial suspicions were correct. Also, be sure to pay attention to the memory capacity (especially for the RTX 5070) and the length of the bus width, as well as the number of CUDA cores. This 5090 computer is nowhere near the firepower of the 5090 desktop (Nvidia has wisely increased the memory capacity of the 5090 compared to the 5080 desktop), and the 5070 computer offers only 8GB of VRAM on a 128-bit bus, a meager overall figure that, frankly, it’s rarely enough in a 1080p solution in the newer games of 2025, Nvidia can claim that the AI advantages of DLSS 4 reduce memory needs.
That’s all fine and dandy, but how are those puppies behaving? Jensen didn’t go into details in the stream, but he conveyed some high-level Blackwell specs that are more important to AI researchers than gamers: AI TOPS, RT TFLOPS, “AI control processor” matrix, etc. You can see everything in the screenshot above.
On the plus side, at least some of Nvidia’s RTX 50-series will include bleeding-edge GDDR7 memory, helping to deliver up to 1.8TB/s of memory bandwidth, or twice what was possible with its predecessor. It will also offer dual shaders for INT and floating point calculations (the big two for traditional gaming graphics), the ability to intermix GPU and AI workloads as needed, and programmable GPU shaders that can process neural network tasks.
If it sounds like Nvidia is going all-in on AI, well, they have been for years. Haven’t you seen DLSS and DLSS 3 Frame Gen? On that note, Jensen also teased DLSS 4, complete with “neural texture compression” and “neural materials” that reduce the need for traditional GPU rendering even further.
Nvidia claims that while DLSS 3 can simply inject AI-generated frames between GPU-rendered frames, DLSS 4 can infer three full frames from a single classic frame. Hey, after all, AI scaling does away with local graphics. Jensen said a total of about 33 million pixels are generated for four frames of fourK images; with DLSS four, that’s still true, but the GPU only does about two million, and the AI does the rest of the heavy lifting. You can learn more about DLSS four and multi-frame generation on Nvidia’s online page if you’re interested.
As DLSS 3 users who forgot to allow Nvidia Reflex can tell you, injecting AI-generated frames also injects latency – Reflex can recover it. This is a much more pronounced challenge when AI is used to create multiple images. Enter Nvidia Reflex 2, which uses “frame warp generation” to reduce latency by up to 75%. It’s complicated, so watch the video and click this link for a detailed explanation of the generation if you need more details.
Crazy, and very, very variable if it works as advertised. It’s a big if, though, and there are still plenty of questions swirling around the RTX 50 series’ features after Nvidia’s detailed presentation. Stay tuned to PCWorld (and the PCWorld YouTube channel!) for more information. All the latest updates and news from CES 2025.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include videos of MSI and Gigabyte 50 series graphics cards.
Brad Chacos spends his days digging through desktop PCs and tweeting too much. He specializes in graphics cards and gaming, but covers everything from security to Windows tips and all manner of PC hardware.
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