After months of speculation and anticipation, Nvidia finally lifted the cover off its latest lineup of consumer graphics cards, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 series, starting with the flagship RTX 5090.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made the announcement at a packed arena at Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay resort and casino, a headline event that topped off a day of major reveals from rivals AMD and Intel.
However, the Nvidia RTX 5000 series graphics cards were always going to steal the show, no matter what anyone else announced, so Huang naturally had the limelight on Monday night as he unveiled our first definitive look at the RTX 5090.
Meet Nvidia’s new flagship GPU, the Nvidia Tita— I mean the Nvidia RTX 5090
It might not be called the Nvidia Titan RTX, but the RTX 5090 might as well be, given the specs on offer and its downright scandalous MSRP.
With an astounding 170 streaming multiprocessors (amounting to 21,760 CUDA cores, 170 ray tracing cores, and 680 Tensor cores), the RTX 5090 will unquestionably be the most powerful consumer graphics card on the planet, and it won’t even be close.
Pair the GPU specs with new 32GB of GDDR7 memory on a massive 512-bit memory bus and PCIe 5.0 x16 interface, it has an astonishing 1.52 TB/s of memory bandwidth, with a memory speed upwards of 23.8 Gbps.
All this hardware comes with a substantially higher power draw, however, as it pulls down an astounding 575W max power, requiring a 950W power supply to run it.
Given its specs, not only will this graphics card absolutely blow through native 4K gaming (without upscaling) at the highest settings (including ray tracing), it’s arguably the first real 8K graphics card given the amount of VRAM it has and its memory bandwidth, two key specs that allow a graphics card to process the substantially larger 8K texture files needed for gaming at that resolution.
Of course, few games even support 8K resolution, much less have developers and artists effectively wasting their time on texture files so large that only a rare few will ever see them as intended. But there’s no doubt that if 8K gaming ever becomes a thing, the RTX 5090 will be more than ready to meet the challenge.
Of course, that doesn’t really address the fact that this is no longer a gaming or enthusiast GPU— not anymore, and not at this price.
Costing nearly $1,000 (about £800/AU$1,500) more than the Nvidia RTX 4090 when it launched in October 2022, the RTX 5090 is purely a professional workstation GPU, meant to process raw 4K video streams or render lengthy 3D generated sequences at Pixar or some other animation studio. As fun as it might be, this is not a graphics card meant to play Wolfenstein 3D.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is set to go on sale for $2,499 on TKTK.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 will launch first
In a move that has been telegraphed for a while, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 will be the first of Nvidia’s new graphics card to hit store shelves later this month.
The RTX 5080 is almost exactly half of the RTX 5090 in terms of specs. With 84 SMs, the 5080 sports 10,752 CUDA cores, 84 ray tracing cores, and 336 Tensor cores on a PCIe 5.0 interface.
It also has new GDDR7 VRAM as well, with a pool of 16GB on a 256-bit memory bus for just under 1TB/s of memory bandwidth. Its memory speed is a blazing fast 30 Gbps, which helps make up for the narrower memory bus, and the card’s maximum power draw is 360W, which is slightly more than the RTX 4080 it replaces.
The card will go on January 21st with an MSRP of $1,299.99 (about £1,040/AU$1,950), which is $100 more than the launch price of the RTX 4080.
Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti also unveiled
The Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti also debuted on Monday night, and as expected, it is essentially a cut-down version of the RTX 5080.
Sporting 70 SMs, the RTX 5070 Ti packs in 8,960 CUDA cores, 70 ray tracing cores, and 280 Tensor cores on a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface.
Its memory profile is nearly identical to the RTX 5080, with 16GB GDDR7 VRAM, a memory speed of 28 Gbps on a 256-bit bus, and a memory bandwidth of 894.7GB/s, making it more than ready for 4K gaming.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is set to go on sale on TKTK for $$$.
Spec details on the new Nvidia RTX 5000 series cards
Here’s a quick breakdown of the specs for the three graphics cards unveiled on Monday:
| Header Cell – Column 0 | RTX 4090 | RTX 4080 | RTX 4070 Ti |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU Variant | GB202-400-A1 | GB203-400-A1 | GB203-200-A1 |
| Process | Row 1 – Cell 1 | Row 1 – Cell 2 | Row 1 – Cell 3 |
| PCIe Interface | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 |
| SM Count | 170 | 84 | 70 |
| CUDA Cores | 21,760 | 10,752 | 8,960 |
| RT Cores | 170 | 84 | 70 |
| Tensor Cores | 680 | 336 | 280 |
| Memory Type | GDDR7 | GDDR7 | GDDR7 |
| Memory (GB) | 32 | 16 | 16 |
| Memory Speed (Gbps effective) | 23.8 | 30.0 | 28.0 |
| Memory Bus | 512-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 1.52 TB/s | 973.8 GB/s | 894.7 GB/s |
| TDP (W) | 575 | 360 | 300 |
| Recommended PSU (W) | 950 | 750 | 700 |
| Power connector | 1 x 16-pin | 1 x 16-pin | 1 x 16-pin |
| Output | 1 x HDMI 2.1, 3 x DisplayPort 1.4a | 1 x HDMI 2.1, 3 x DisplayPort 1.4a | 1 x HDMI 2.1, 3 x DisplayPort 1.4a |