Nvidia has finally revealed the GeForce RTX 50 series graphics chips, headlined by the RTX 5090 GPU.
With the closely guarded announcements during the keynote address at CES 2025, Nvidia justified the buzz surrounding the AI enhancements within the Blackwell series chips, which has driven the company’s value to the stratosphere in recent months.
The top RTX 5090 chip offers an incredible 3,352 AI TOPS (trillion operations per second) from its 92 billion transistors. Some of this power, Nvidia says, can be used to generate autonomous game characters that can “perceive, plan and act like human players” in sync with game rendering.
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That same chip also overs 380 ray tracing teraflops per second. For reference, that’s around double the 191 RT FLOPS of the previous generation RTX 4090. It’ll enable ray-traced graphics to be rendered at double the speeds.
Another headline spec is the 125 Shader TFLOPS. Again that’s a substantial improvement on the 82 TFLOPS offered by the previous generation’s highest spec 4090 chip. This is possible via new technology like RTX Neural Shaders which “brings small AI networks into programmable shaders, unlocking film-quality materials, lighting and more in real-time games.”
Meanwhile, the RTX Neural Faces tech can render a temporally stable, high quality digital face in real time. We’ll need to see more of this in real time, but boy does this sound groundbreaking.
Furthermore the G7 memory on this chip offers an astonishing 1.8TB/s of bandwidth, which is twice has fast as the previous generation Ada Lovelace-based chip, announced in late 2022.
The new generation also includes DLSS 4 (deep learning super sampling) technology which users AI to go beyond generating frames to boost the frame rate of video games. The Blackwell series chips, Nvidia says, can now “predict the future”.
“We used GeForce to enable AI and now AI is revolutionising GeForce,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and CEO, during the CES keynote in the early hours of Tuesday morning UK time.
The new DLSS 4 tech improves performance up to 8x over traditional brute force processing methods. Now it can generate an additional three frames per rendered frame. The tech will be supported by 75 games and applications on the day of launch.
RTX 50 price and availability
Available this month, the RTX 5090 will cost $1,999, which is $400 more than the previous generation RTX 90 model. From March you’ll be able to get a gaming laptop running this chip (with 1,800 AI TOPS) from $2,899.
However, the true value might be a little farther down the trough through the new RTX 5070 GPU which matches the performance offered by the last-gen’s 4090 graphics chip for a mere $549. In fact, Nvidia advertised an entire rig running the RTX 5070 chip (800 AI TOPS) for $1,299.
The middle ground is the RTX 5080 GPU, which has a standalone cost of $999, while you’ll be able to get this within a laptop with 1250 AI TOPS for $2199.
“Blackwell, the engine of AI, has arrived for PC gamers, developers and creatives,” Huang said. “Fusing AI-driven neural rendering and ray tracing, Blackwell is the most significant computer graphics innovation since we introduced programmable shading 25 years ago.”
