January 8: The NVIDIA CEO Keynote was covered live by Senior Editor Zac Bowden, preserved here for future reference in reverse post order.
NVIDIA CEO and all-around leather jacket enthusiast Jensen Huang will take the stage at CES 2025 in Las Vegas today, January 6, at 6:20 PM Pacific Time for a keynote speech. While the talk will undoubtedly cover the company’s dominance in artificial intelligence and perhaps even its expansion into robotics, there’s an overwhelming expectation for a big reveal of the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards.
RTX 5000 GPUs have long since pointed to an early 2025 launch, and an official pricing announcement for the upcoming codenamed “Blackwell” cards would be the most hotly anticipated topic for today’s opening keynote. We’ll have Senior Editor Zac Bowden attending the CEO’s speech as it happens, and we plan to bring you the most exciting live news. If you can’t watch the NVIDIA CEO keynote live on the official CES YouTube channel, stay tuned to our live blog, and we’ll keep you informed! — Ben Wilson
Everything you need to know
That’s going to do it for us from the NVIDIA keynote! The big news today is the announcement of RTX 5000 GPUs, including the monster RTX 5090 with a $1,999 price tag.
NVIDIA does bring good news for our wallets, with the RTX 5070 promising RTX 4090 performance for a much more modest $549. NVIDIA says this price is only possible thanks to the capabilities of AI.
In between the two GPUs are the RTX 5070 Ti for $749 and the RTX 5080 for $999. All four of the new RTX 5000 GPUs are expected to hit markets in January.
Thank you and thank you again for checking out our coverage! It’s now time to enjoy the rest of CES 2025.
COSMOS is open-license. Available on Github. The crowd cheers!
“It is trained on 20 million hours of video” which focus on physical, dynamic things, like humans walking, hands moving, etc.
COSMOS generations prioritize real world environments, lighting, and object permanence
“Today we’re announcing NVIDIA Cosmos. A world foundation model that was designed and created to understand the physical world.”
“What if, instead of PDFs, it’s your surroundings.” This is a sensible play for the future of robotics. We need to create a “world model” rather than generative models.”
Now talking about physical AI. Will robots overtake us?
Someone just shouted “I’m switching to Linux” and Huang said “Linux is good!” Poor Windows.
“Our goal is to turn Windows and WSL2 into a target, first class platform for AI”
“WSL2 supports CUDA out of box.”
NVIDIA now talking about Windows Subsystem for Linux as a pathway to making Windows the best platform for AI.
Looks like we might be wrapping up shortly.
“AI agents are likely to be a multi-trillion dollar business.” I bet stock holders are very happy.
Looking less likely that we’re going to see more info on the graphics cards’ gaming performance. Still talking about AI capabilities and ecosystem partners.
The three models are Nano, Super, and Ultra.
“Today we’re announcing a whole family of AI models that are based off NVIDIA Llama Nemotron Language Foundation Models”
Not much graphics card talk going on right now. Instead, we’re talking about Agentic AI and generative chat.
“130 trillion transistors in total.”
Now talking about how Blackwell will be beneficial for businesses and servers.
Blackwell improves the performance per wat by a factor of 4 compared to last gen.
Now taking a closer look at the Blackwell silicon.
The three scaling laws. All in use on these new RTX cards to deliver better visuals in real time.
NVIDIA says the $549 5070 will deliver the same performance as the $1,599 4090. That’s the real big news today.
It’s worth noting that while the crowd cheered at the 5070’s $549 price tag, there was less enthusiasm for the $,1999 price tag of the 5090.
Now back to talking about AI and scaling laws.
The RTX Blackwell family.
“None of this is possible without AI” referring to the affordability of these cards.
NVIDIA RTX 5080 is $999.
Availability starting this month!
NVIDIA RTX 5090 is $1,999.
NVIDIA RTX 5070 is $549. The crowd cheers!
4000 TOPS
380 RT TFLOPS
125 Shader TFLOPS
92 Billion Transistors
G7 Memory
1.8TB/s Memory Bandwidth.
Ai-Management Processor
“It’s state of the art. Incredible design. Engineering team did a great job.”
The RTX 50 series. Has 4000 TOPS of AI compute power!
“Today we are announcing our next generation. The RTX Blackwell family.”
Out of 33 million pixels, NVIDIA’s tech only computed 2 million of them. AI predicted the rest!
It can infer and predict the pixels that NVIDIA did not render. It can predict the future, generating three additional frames for every frame that is calculated.
“Ray tracing is a simulation of light. It would be impossible to render in real time without artificial intelligence.”
It’s all about neural technology, using AI to improve game graphics in real time.
RTX Neural Material is enhancing graphics while using less RAM, the video is suggesting.
Now getting a real time demo showcasing how AI is enhancing game graphics on GeForce cards. It looks good!
“Machine learning has changed how every application will be built, and how computing is done.”
“Every single layer of the technology stack has been completely changed. An incredible transformation in just 12 years.” And it’s all thanks to AI, says Huang.
It all links to AI, moving from perception AI to generative AI, to agentic AI, to, soon, physical AI. Which Huang says will be talked about more later today.
A quick recap on NVIDIA’s graphics tech. Now talking about CUDA, which was introduced in 2006.
The tour consists if walking through NVIDIA’s headquarters and timeline, which Huang says is powered by AI.
We’re now getting a digital tour of NVIDIA’s headquarters.
“Do you like my jacket? Get used to it!”
Jensen Huang now taking the stage.
Starting with a inspiration video highlighting all the different NVIDIA-powered tech you can use today.
Okay, now the show is beginning!
Looks like the main event will be beginning momentarily. Take the time to appreciate a full house for NVIDIA today!
Never Gonna Give You Up currently playing. It seems the actual keynote hasn’t started yet?!
Lots of preamble here. Let’s get to the real news!
Currently talking up NVIDIA’s large business, which covers everything from chatbots to graphics cards to AI.
The show is starting! A nice welcome message from the producer of CES!
The livestream is now open online, and the last audience and press members are filtering into the auditorium. It’s nearly time to see what NVIDIA has in store!
The queue is long and very busy! Thousands of people are here to see NVIDIA announce what’s next.
Okay, Zac here. I’m now in line at the Mandalay Arena! Queue looks to be moving slowly but surely.
What cards are we expecting NVIDIA to unveil today? Word on the rumor mill is the company will unveil four RTX 50 series GPUs today, those being the top end RTX 5090, 5080, 5070, and 5070 Ti.
The NVIDIA RTX 5090 is also rumored to be the first “true” 4K-capable gaming graphics card. Up until now, while the 4090 can game at 4K, a lot of AAA titles will often see a big performance hit unless other graphics settings are toned down. That should be much less of a problem with the RTX 5090. — Zac Bowden
What cards are we expecting NVIDIA to unveil today? Word on the rumor mill is the company will unveil four RTX 50 series GPUs today, those being the top end RTX 5090, 5080, 5070, and 5070 Ti.
The NVIDIA RTX 5090 is also rumored to be the first “true” 4K-capable gaming graphics card. Up until now, while the 4090 can game at 4K, a lot of AAA titles will often see a big performance hit unless other graphics settings are toned down. That should be much less of a problem with the RTX 5090. — Zac Bowden
Even though the keynote isn’t for another few hours, we already know some details about what NVIDIA is going to announce. It’s looking likely that the RTX 5090 will be on the agenda, as VideoCardz.com has already leaked its retail packaging, revealing some interesting specs!
So far, we know the RTX 5090 will sport 32GB of GDDR7 memory, which is expected to be twice the amount of RAM found in the RTX 5080, a card that we’re also expecting to be announced today.
Of course, what we all really want to know is how capable these cards are… and more importantly, how expensive they’ll be. — Zac Bowden
What cards are we expecting NVIDIA to unveil today? Word on the rumor mill is the company will unveil four RTX 50 series GPUs today, those being the top end RTX 5090, 5080, 5070, and 5070 Ti.
The NVIDIA RTX 5090 is also rumored to be the first “true” 4K-capable gaming graphics card. Up until now, while the 4090 can game at 4K, a lot of AAA titles will often see a big performance hit unless other graphics settings are toned down. That should be much less of a problem with the RTX 5090. — Zac Bowden
Not long now! Just five little hours until Jensen takes the stage in (presumably) his leather jacket and tells us the prices of RTX 50 Series GPUs.. right? I’m crossing all my fingers and toes that they’re not extremely overpriced but also for enough of a spec jump that an upgrade will be worth it. — Ben Wilson
