After months of rumors, Nvidia showed off its latest generation of desktop and laptop graphics cards at CES 2025. The RTX 50 series is the fastest lineup of GPUs developed by Nvidia. Starting with the RTX 5070, Nvidia claims it delivers performance on par with the previous generation’s top model, the RTX 4090, for just $549 instead of the 4090’s $1,599. Moving on, the RTX 5070 Ti costs $749, the RTX 5080 costs $999, and the RTX 5090 costs $1,999. All of these cards will be available starting later this month.
The RTX 50 Series marks a leap to GDDR7 video memory (VRAM), which is more powerful and more power efficient than the GDDR6x used in most RTX 40 Series cards. Aside from the horsepower increase, the most important new feature on the RTX 50 series cards is DLSS 4. It builds on Nvidia’s previous versions, all of which aim to increase gaming performance while making a series of visual compromises (i.e. lower performance). Rendering resolution (using AI to generate new frames to make games run more smoothly) is becoming increasingly difficult to spot as technology improves. Nvidia touts that DLSS 4 makes much more use of AI, generating three frames with trained AI for every one rendered on the GPU, allowing games to look better and run faster. Relying heavily on the GPU’s Tensor AI cores is one of the things that makes Nvidia’s RTX 50 series more efficient, Nvidia says.
It was a big day for new gaming GPUs, with AMD also announcing some new hardware at CES. The company’s new RDNA 4 graphics architecture and FSR4 upscaling and frame generation technology will soon debut on graphics cards including the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070. Pricing and availability for this card have not yet been announced. It will likely compete directly with GPUs in Nvidia’s RTX 50 series lineup.
