After months of rumors, Nvidia debuted its latest generation of desktop and laptop graphics cards at CES 2025. The RTX 50 series is the fastest line of GPUs developed by Nvidia. Nvidia says that starting with the RTX 5070, it will deliver performance comparable to the top-of-the-range model of the previous generation, the RTX 4090, for just $549 instead of $1,599 for the 4090. Going forward, the RTX 5070 Ti will cost $749, $999 for the RTX 5080 and $1,999 for the RTX 5090. All of these cards will be available later this month.
The RTX 50 series marks the transition to GDDR7 video memory (VRAM), which is both more powerful and energy-efficient than the GDDR6x used in most RTX 40-series cards. The most vital of the modern features of the RTX 50-series cards – apart from the enhance in power – is DLSS 4. It builds on previous iterations of Nvidia, all of which aimed to enhance gaming performance while making a number of visual compromises (i.e. resolution rendering, using artificial intelligence to generate modern frames to make games run more smoothly), which become more and more hard as technology improves. Nvidia touts that DLSS 4 leverages AI even further – generating 3 AI-trained frames for every 1 rendered on the GPU – to make games look better and run faster. This hefty reliance on Tensor AI cores in GPUs is part of what makes Nvidia’s RTX 50 series more proficient, Nvidia claims.
It was a large day for modern gaming GPUs as AMD also announced modern hardware at CES. The company’s modern RDNA 4 graphics architecture and FSR4 upscaling and frame-generation technology will debut soon in graphics cards including the AMD Radeon RX 9070 RTX 50 from Nvidia.
