Nvidia unveils its RTX 50 series GPUs, led by the massive RTX 5090
Nvidia finally has pulled back the curtain the next series of graphics cards. If you’ve somehow avoided the mountain of Nvidia rumors and leaks powerful, hugeand power-hungry RTX 50 series GPUs that are all that and more.
The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 series includes all the usual suspects, although we’ll see the more powerful cards first. RTX 5070, 5070 Ti, 5080 and the top 5090 are present and accounted for. This is the first time Nvidia has decided to release a “titanium” edition card alongside the main card, although there’s nothing wrong with having more options up front.
These are also the most expensive cards the company has ever produced. The RTX 4090 will retail for $1,600. To take the sting out of it, the company also announced that the RTX 5070 will cost $550. The RTX 5070 Ti will cost $750 and the 5080 will cost $1000.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at the Michelob Ultra arena at the Mandalay Bay casino and first asked the crowd “do you like my jacket?” He has a reason to act like a celebrity. The company’s AI training chips have made it one of the most profitable in the world. AI was the main theme behind his entire presentation. This was one of the big reasons why the specifications of the new RTX graphics cards looked so strange.
He also claims that people who pick up the RTX 5070, even on a laptop, can expect performance equivalent to the RTX 4090. Much of that, he said, is due to the company’s Tensor cores and the AI that supports the performance of the map.
“GeForce brought AI to the masses,” he said. “Now we’re bringing AI to GeForce.”
The top-end Blackwell cards will have 380 RT TFLOPS and 125 shader TFLOPS plus 1.8 TB/s of memory bandwidth. We’ll get more information on the exact number of CUDA cores and VRAM soon, but it’s safe to say that the RTX 5090 is 50% more card than Nvidia’s previous massive, ultra-powerful GPU, the RTX 4090.
Add to all this a new software package with enhanced AI scaling in DLSS 4. This now includes updated ray reconstruction and super-resolution models aided by AI transformer models.
You have to have a big case and big pockets to even consider putting an RTX 5090 in your case. Meanwhile, the RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 offer power beyond their counterparts from two years ago.
The new Blackwell cards should arrive in the next few weeks. What didn’t air was any mention of more budget cards. We’ll have to wait a few months for the RTX 5050, 5060 and 5060 Ti to appear.
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