As was foretold, Nvidia has revealed its new RTX 50-series desktop graphics cards at its CES 2025 keynote, which took place in the early hours UK time. The current lineup includes four cards: a $1999/£1939 RTX 5090, a $999/£979 RTX 5080, a $749/£729 RTX 5070 Ti and a $549/£539 RTX 5070. Each “Blackwell” graphics card comes equipped with GDDR7 memory, some impressive frame-rate claims and DLSS 4 multi frame generation. The two top-end cards are arriving on 30th January, while the upper-mid-range offerings are scheduled for February.
The “relative performance” claims for some of these graphics cards are wild, so let’s start with an idea of expected frame-rates for each card and a quick explainer of DLSS 4 multi frame generation before we cover off the architectural improvements.
The $1999 RTX 5090 is unsurprisingly positioned as the ultimate graphics card, a prosumer model with 32GB of GDDR7. It’s based around the GB202 GPU with 92 billion transistors, versus 76 billion on the 4090, and includes 21760 CUDA cores. Nvidia’s slides promise double the frame-rates of the RTX 4090, or a comfortable 4K 240Hz with full RT and maxed settings in games that support the multi frame generation (MFG) feature.
To explain before we go further, MFG adds in up to three generated frames for each traditionally rendered frame. This results in higher frame-rates and therefore visual fluidity, but not necessarily higher as we’d typically label it, as latency is reliant on the “base” frame-rate rather than the final “output” frame-rate. The concept is similar to the original frame generation (FG) feature on RTX 40-series cards, and as such relies on developer integration and Nvidia’s Reflex 2 latency mitigation tech to work well.