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It’s official: Nvidia’s next generation of gaming graphics is here, and my friends, the GeForce RTX 50 series seems to be pretty attractively priced on paper. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced 8 more GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards in his CES 2025 keynote: four for desktops and four for laptops, all supporting a next-generation DLSS fourArray.
The same GPUs have been announced for both form factors: GeForce RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, and 5070. This is a big difference from AMD’s discourse, where not even the RDNA four and the Radeon RX 9070 were discussed despite the favorable conditions. Reception by the press. – 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 prices than their predecessors. . . unless it’s the RTX 5090. But there’s a reason for that.
I was convinced that the GeForce RTX 5090 would cost $2500 or more, based on leaked specs. Well, Jensen didn’t actually move on to product specs, however, at $1,999, it’s a smart deal for AI researchers, if not necessarily gamers. With 32GB of VRAM and a rugged 512-bit bus, along with Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell GPU, this device will be fierce in gaming, but unheard of in device learning responsibilities if you can’t own a gaming card. Dear Nvidia company.
The theme goes down the line: At $999, the RTX 5080 costs $200 less than the 4080 did at launch (and the same as the RTX 4080 Super). At $749 and $549, the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 cost $50 less than their predecessors (though to be fair, I called the RTX 4070 Ti “hobbled and wildly overpriced”). Better yet, Jensen said that the RTX 5070 delivers RTX 4090-class performance for roughly a third of the price.
Inside, the new Nvidia Founders Edition dual-flow dual-fan design, with a small 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 revised versions of Nvidia’s Founders Edition may not reflect the same value you’ll see in traditional third-party products. cards. Nvidia’s announcement post for the 50 series, published after the keynote, includes major points of high-level functionality for desktop GPUs, but only in full ray tracing and DLSS situations. Since we don’t have a tangible concept of the functionality benefits that DLSS four brings, take them a little with a grain of salt for now. However, it shows what is possible.
Nvidia says the RTX 5090 is “2X Faster Than The GeForce RTX 4090;” the RTX 5080 is “Twice As Fast As The GeForce RTX 4080;” the RTX 5070 is “2X Faster Than The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti;” and 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 DLSS and ray tracing features. The RTX 5090 offers far 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 want to be tweaked. do the heavy lifting if Nvidia plans to offer big functionality improvements. We’ll see!
Look for RTX 50-series graphics cards to start hitting the market later this January in some form. Nvidia didn’t say which cards are launching when.
Usually, Nvidia launches desktop GPUs well before their laptop counterparts, but not with the RTX 50-series! Well, kinda. They’re launching in March, while the desktop cards launch this month, but Jensen revealed both onstage.
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.
However, pay close attention to the TOP AIs indexed under the style numbers for computer and desktop GPUs. Laptop graphics tend to be scaled down compared to their desktop cousins, and AI TOPS suggests that’s the case with the RTX 50 series as well. The RTX 5090 desktop card offers 3400 AI TOPS, while the desktop edition it hits 1850, about the same as the desktop RTX 5080. (Not surprising, since the 4090 computer is necessarily a 4080 desktop built into a computer. ) The same trend continues. in the 50 series line of computers.
Update: Nvidia’s GeForce online page provided more specifications 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 bus width length, 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 offers only 8 GB of VRAM on a 128-bit bus, a poor overall figure that, frankly, is rarely enough on a 1080p solution in newer games. 2025, Nvidia may claim that the AI advantages of DLSS 4 reduce memory needs.
That’s all well and good, but how do those puppies behave?Jensen didn’t go into detail about the stream, but he did convey some high-level Blackwell specs that are more important to AI researchers than gamers: AI TOPS, RT TFLOPS, “AI control processor. “and so on. You can see everything in the screenshot above.
On the plus side, at least some of Nvidia’s RTX 50 series will come with next-gen GDDR7 memory, helping to deliver up to 1. 8TB/s of memory bandwidth, double what was imaginable with its predecessor. . It will also offer dual shaders for INT and floating point calculations (the big two for classic game graphics), the ability to mix GPU and AI workloads as needed, and programmable GPU shaders capable of processing neural network tasks.
While it turns out that Nvidia is betting on AI, well, it has been for years. Haven’t you noticed DLSS and DLSS 3 Frame Gen? On that note, Jensen also teased DLSS 4, which features “neural texture compression” and “neural materials” that further reduce the need for classic GPU rendering.
Nvidia claims that while DLSS 3 can simply inject AI-generated frames between each GPU-rendered frame, DLSS 4 can infer three full frames from a single classic frame. Hey, after all, AI enhancement does away with local graphics. Jensen said a total of about 33 million pixels are generated for four frames of 4K images; with DLSS four this is still true, but the GPU only yields around two million, and the AI does the rest of the work. You can learn more about DLSS four and frame generation on Nvidia’s website if you’re interested.
As DLSS 3 users who forgot to turn on Nvidia Reflex can tell you, injecting AI-generated frames also injects latency — though Reflex can claw it back. That’s a much, much more pronounced problem when you’re using AI to create multiple frames. Enter Nvidia Reflex 2, which uses “frame warp technology” to reduce latency by up to 75 percent. It’s complicated stuff, so watch the video and hit that link for an in-depth explanation of the technology if you’re interested in more details.
Bonkers – and potentially very, very game changing if it works as advertised. That’s a big if, though, and there are plenty of questions still swirling around the RTX 50-series’ capabilities after Nvidia’s detail-light keynote. Stay tuned to PCWorld (and PCWorld’s YouTube channel!) for all the latest updates and news coming from CES 2025.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to include videos of MSI and Gigabyte 50-series graphics cards.
Brad Chacos spends his days researching desktop computers and tweeting too much. It specializes in graphics cards and gaming, but covers everything from security to Windows tips and all types of PC hardware.
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