Nvidia stokes RTX 50-series hype with Witcher 4 and a global LAN party

Endless rumors have pointed to CES 2025 in January as the big reveal for Nvidia’s hotly anticipated GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards, powered by the company’s new “Blackwell” architecture. With a media blitz timed to coincide with this year’s (surprisingly good!) Game Awards, Nvidia effectively made it unofficially official.

First, the part I’m personally most hyped about: CDProjekt’s surprise Witcher 4 cinematic reveal. I’ve dropped the trailer below (handle your biz, Ciri!), but the important part for this article is the note right at the beginning: “Cinematic trailer pre-rendered in Unreal Engine 5 on an unannounced Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU.” Giggity!

But that’s not all. Nvidia also launched a big marketing campaign on social networks at the same time. It mostly touts Nvidia’s GeForce LAN 50, described as “a global online & in-person 50 Hour Gaming Marathon” with lots of prizes available in an email to press. (You can register to attend here). Hmmmm, that’s a lot of 50s!

The GeForce Twitter account not only played up GeForce LAN 50, but also immediately followed up with an invitation to watch Nvidia’s CES keynote on January 6. Mighty coincidental, that.

The Nvidia landing page for the festivities hints at a RTX 50-series reveal at CES as well, saying the following:

“Twenty-five years ago, we launched the first GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce 256. Before we look to the future, let’s take a nostalgic journey to celebrate the all-time greats of PC gaming.”

That’s an awful lot of smoke. Nvidia is clearly stoking the hype train fires for a big RTX 50-series reveal at the annual electronics trade show. Will we see an RTX 5090? RTX 5080? Something to compete with Intel’s awesome new $249 Arc B580 graphics card? (Probably not on that last one). I’ll be at Nvidia’s RTX 2025 keynote, ready to bring you the news as it happens. In the meantime, we’ve got a rundown on the most credible RTX 50-series leaks and rumors if you want to start catching up on things.