Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs

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.

The RTX 50-series GPUs will be available starting in January and include a new design for the Founders Edition, with just two double flow-through fans, a 3D vapor chamber, and GDDR7 memory.

Surprisingly, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition will be a two-slot GPU and will be capable of fitting inside small form factor PCs. It 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.

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. Nvidia is promising big performance gains with the RTX 5080 over the previous RTX 4080 model as a result.

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.

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.