Image: Nvidia
Nvidia is officially announcing its RTX 50-series GPUs today. After months of leaks and rumors, the next-generation RTX Blackwell GPUs are now official, and there are four of them on the way.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the RTX 50-series GPUs during a CES keynote this evening, announcing a $1,999 RTX 5090, a $999 RTX 5080, a $749 RTX 5070 Ti, and a $549 RTX 5070. Nvidia’s new RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs will both be available on January 30th, with the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 to follow in February.
Image: Nvidia
Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs.
The RTX 50-series GPUs include a new design for the Founders Edition, with just two double flow-through fans, a 3D vapor chamber, and GDDR7 memory. All of the RTX 50-series cards are PCIe Gen 5 and include DisplayPort 2.1b connectors to drive displays up to 8K and 165Hz.
Surprisingly, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition will be a two-slot GPU and will be capable of fitting inside small form factor PCs — a big departure from the size of the RTX 4090. The RTX 5090 has 32GB of GDDR7, a memory bandwidth of 1,792GB/sec, and a massive 21,760 CUDA cores.
This all adds up to a GPU that Nvidia says will be two times faster than the RTX 4090, thanks to DLSS 4 and the Blackwell architecture. But it will come at a cost of power consumption, as Nvidia says the RTX 5090 will have a total graphics power of 575 watts and a recommended PSU requirement of 1000 watts. That’s 125 watts more than the RTX 4090.
Nvidia demonstrated Cyberpunk 2077 running on an RTX 5090 with DLSS 4 at 238fps compared to 106fps on an RTX 4090 with DLSS 3.5. Both GPUs are running the game with full ray tracing enabled.
The RTX 5080 is designed to be twice as fast as the RTX 4080 and will include 16GB of GDDR7 memory, a memory bandwidth of 960GB/sec, and 10,752 CUDA cores. The RTX 5080 will have a total graphics power of 360 watts and Nvidia is recommending a 850-watt power supply. Nvidia is promising big performance gains with the RTX 5080 over the previous RTX 4080 model as a result of these specs.
Image: Nvidia
Nvidia’s RTX 5080 performance promises.
Nvidia is also launching an RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070. The RTX 5070 Ti includes 16GB of GDDR7 memory, a memory bandwidth of 896GB/s, and 8,960 CUDA cores. The RTX 5070 has 12GB of GDDR7, a memory bandwidth of 672 GB/sec, and 6,144 CUDA cores. The RTX 5070 Ti will have a total graphics power of 300 watts and require a 750-watt PSU, while the RTX 5070 has a total graphics power of 250 watts and only needs a 650-watt PSU.
Nvidia says the RTX 5070 Ti will be 2x faster than the RTX 4070 Ti, and the RTX 5070 should be twice as fast as the RTX 4070. Huang even claimed on stage at CES that the RTX 5070 will deliver “RTX 4090 performance at $549,” but this will undoubtedly be because of DLSS 4 improvements and not pure rasterization performance.
Nvidia is also bringing its RTX 50-series to laptops, with the RTX 5090 laptop GPU debuting with 24GB of GDDR7 memory. The RTX 5080 laptop GPU will ship with 16GB of GDDR7 memory, the RTX 5070 Ti with 12GB of GDDR7 memory, and the RTX 5070 with just 8GB of GDDR7 memory. RTX 50-series laptops will be available starting in March from a variety of PC makers.
Image: Nvidia
RTX 50-series laptops are coming in March.
Huang demonstrated Nvidia’s RTX Blackwell GPUs with a real-time rendering demo at the beginning of the company’s CES keynote today. The demo included new RTX Neural Materials, RTX Neural Faces, text to animation, and even DLSS 4. “The new generation of DLSS can generate beyond frames, it can predict the future,” says Huang. “We used GeForce to enable AI, and now AI is revolutionizing GeForce.”
Nvidia’s new RTX Neural Shaders can be used to compress textures in games, while RTX Neural Faces aim to improve face quality using generative AI. The next generation of DLSS includes Multi Frame Generation, which generates up to three additional frames per traditional frame and can multiply frame rates by up to 8x over traditional rendering, according to Nvidia.
DLSS 4 also includes a real-time application of transformers to improve image quality, reduce ghosting, and add higher detail in motion. The DLSS 4 upgrade will even work on existing RTX GPUs, as features have been upgraded to the new transformer AI models. You can read more about DLSS 4 right here.
Nvidia’s RTX 50-series announcement comes more than two years after the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 were announced, based on Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture. Nvidia’s RTX 40-series of GPUs focused on improving ray tracing with Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) version 3, and the RTX 4090 delivered some truly impressive performance gains over the previous RTX 3090 GPU.