Nvidia announces the RTX 50-series, led by the $1,999 RTX 5090 with 'twice the performance of the 4090'

With more AI acceleration than ever even the RTX 5070 is claimed to offer RTX 4090-level performance for $549.

Nvidia has announced the RTX 50-series, codename Blackwell, at CES 2025. The new cards come with massive improvements to AI acceleration, with CEO Jensen Huang claiming "AI is coming home to GeForce".

CEO Huang announced the entire lineup at CES 2025, from the RTX 5090 to the RTX 5070. Let's get right into prices:

• RTX 5090 — $1,999
• RTX 5080 — $999
• RTX 5070 Ti — $749
• RTX 5070 — $549

As for performance comparisons, Nvidia didn't give us much to go on during the stream, except the promise that the RTX 5090 will offer 'twice the performance of the 4090' and the RTX 5070, a $549 card, will compete with the RTX 4090. Though DLSS 4 and new AI features are playing a huge role here, which also means the improvement might be more limited in games that don't support these features.

In the video below, published shortly after the announcement, Nvidia shows how DLSS 4 (a feature called Multi Frame Generation, in fact) helps the RTX 5090 deliver double the frames as the RTX 4090 in a Cyberpunk 2077 ray-traced benchmark.

At least Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, and Black Myth: Wukong are confirmed to support DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation.

Huang doubled down on this AI uplift for the RTX 5070: "4090 performance at $549," proclaimed Huang during the show.

"Impossible without artificial intelligence. Impossible without 4 teraops of AI Tensor cores. Impossible without the G7 memories."

At the beginning of the stream, Nvidia showed off a ray-traced scene rendered (inferred?) in real-time on Blackwell, which included new AI features to massively accelerate performance and save memory.

The RTX 50-series features an AI Management Processor, new Blackwell Tensor Cores with FP4 support, DLSS 4, and Huang alluded to in-shader AI acceleration to help spread the workload of the new AI systems.

There are RTX Neural Shaders, which allow the GPU's programmable shaders to run neural networks. Essentially, in-shader AI acceleration, alongside the Tensor Cores. These can be used to compress textures by up to seven times. As shown in the screenshots below.
 

As for when you can get your hands on these cards, here's the availability:

• RTX 5090 — available January 30
• RTX 5080 — available January 30
• RTX 5070 Ti — availability starting in February
• RTX 5070 — availability starting in February