Blackwell has arrived. At CES on Monday night, Nvidia unveiled its long-awaited next generation of GeForce RTX graphics cards based on its latest Blackwell microarchitecture, and the race will soon begin by AI outfits training large language models and PC gamers alike to gobble up these new cards as soon as they are released.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage in Las Vegas and announced four new GeForce RTX desktop GPUs: the flagship RTX 5090 along with the RTX 5080, 5070 Ti and 5070.
The GeForce RTX 5090 is twice as fast as the previous RTX 4090, according to Huang, thanks to the new Blackwell architecture and DLSS 4. It features 92 billion transistors capable of more than 3,352 trillion AI operations per second. DLSS 4 introduces Multi Frame Generation that improves frame rates by using AI to generate up to three frames per rendered frame. DLSS 4 will be supported in over 75 games and applications the day of launch.
And launch day is coming soon. The RTX 5090 and 5080 will start shipping on Jan. 30, and the 5070 Ti and 5070 will follow sometime in February. Here’s the pricing:
- RTX 5090: $1,999
- RTX 5080: $999
- RTX 5070 Ti: $749
- RTX 5070: $549
In addition to Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards, versions using the GPUs will be available from Nvidia’s usual partners, including Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY and Zotac.
Laptops with mobile versions of the RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti and 5070 are slated to start shipping in March.
In this age of AI, Huang focused on the AI TOPS figures of the new GPUs rather than CUDA cores. Here are the AI TOPS counts of the four new desktop GPUs:
- RTX 5090: 3,352 TOPS
- RTX 5080: 1,801 TOPS
- RTX 5070 Ti: 1,406 TOPS
- RTX 5070: 988 TOPS
And AI is in the new graphics cards. In addition to DLSS 4, Nvidia’s new RTX Neural Shaders uses AI to compress textures for greater memory efficiency, and RTX Neural Faces uses AI to improve the quality of characters’ faces in games.
