NVIDIA announces new RTX 5090 graphics card that costs $2,000 at CES

In tandem with (briefly) becoming the most valuable company in the world, NVIDIA announced its new, long-awaited Blackwell family of graphic cards. CEO Jensen Huang took to the CES 2025 stage to detail that the first batch of RTX 50 series GPUs will arrive in January, with pricing starting at $549 for the RTX 5070 and capping at a whopping $1,999 for the flagship RTX 5090. The mid-tier models are the $749 RTX 5070 Ti and $999 RTX 5080. Laptop versions of the desktop GPUs will be available in March, starting at $1,299 for 5070-equipped PCs.

As for specs, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition will feature 32GB of GDDR7 RAM and 21,760 CUDA cores. Depending on the game, NVIDIA says the 5090 will deliver as much as twice the relative performance, with RT-intensive titles like Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 seeing the largest gains. In the latter, for instance, NVIDIA shared a video that showed the game running at 242 frames per second on the 5090 compared to a relatively paltry 109 fps on the RTX 4090. 

Of course, the performance uplift consumers can expect will depend, in large part, on whether a game supports NVIDIA's new DLSS 4. The tech can generate up to three additional frames for every one frame the GPU renders with traditional rendering techniques. Looking at the performance charts NVIDIA shared, games that are limited to DLSS 3 will see a smaller performance boost. However, the good news is that older RTX GPUs will support DLSS 4, though the tech's killer feature, multi-frame generation, will be exclusive to the company's new 50 series cards. 

Okay, but what about the RTX 5070, you ask? It will boast 6,144 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR7 memory (I can already hear groaning in the comments section). With DLSS 4, NVIDIA claims the 5070 will be as fast as the 4090. Again, it's important to stress those gains will come courtesy of DLSS 4, and rasterization gains, if there are any, will be far more modest. As for the 5070 Ti, the company says it's up to two times faster than the 4070 Ti.    

We knew going into tonight that the 50 series family would almost certainly be power hogs, and that proved to be true. On the top end, NVIDIA recommends a 1,000-watt PSU for the 5090 due to its 575 watts of total graphics power. If there's a silver lining, it's that all the new Founders Edition cards feature two-slot designs.  

	RTX 5090	RTX 5080	RTX 5070 Ti	RTX 5070	RTX 4090
Architecture	Blackwell	Blackwell	Blackwell	Blackwell	Lovelace
CUDA cores	21,760	10,752	8,960	6,144	16,384
AI TOPS	3,352	1,801	1,406	988	1,321
Tensor cores	5th Gen	5th Gen	5th Gen	5th Gen	4th Gen
RT cores	4th Gen	4th Gen	4th Gen	4th Gen	3rd Gen
VRAM	32 GB GDDR7	16 GB GDDR7	16 GB GDDR7	12 GB GDDR7	24 GB GDDR6X
Memory bandwidth	1,792 GB/sec	960 GB/sec	896 GB/sec	672 GB/sec	1,008 GB/sec
TGP	575W	360W	300W	250W	450W

NVIDIA kicked off the Blackwell portion of its CES presentation with a demo of a next-generation Assassin's Creed game featuring the most realistic ray-traced graphics the series has ever featured. "All of this, with AI, is the house that GeForce built," said Huang, wearing a new snakeskin-like jacket instead of his signature leather jacket. "Now, AI is coming home to GeForce."

Be sure to visit Engadget in the coming days as we'll have more on NVIDIA's new GPUs then. 

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