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:
- $1,999 RTX 5090
- $999 RTX 5080
- $749 RTX 5070 Ti
- $549 RTX 5070
The Blackwell family will be led by the RTX 5090, which is a mighty beast. No surprises there. Nvidia cites up to 125 shader TFLOPS, 380 RT TFLOPS, and 4,000 AI TOPS for the Blackwell family, presumably the top GPU configuration with 92 billion transistors, though the RTX 5090 is noted with 3,400 AI TOPS—so a little below the maximum. For comparison, the RTX 4090 has just over 82 FP32 shader TFLOPS from just over 76 billion transistors.
The cards also feature GDDR7 memory, with a maximum of 1.8 TB/s of memory bandwidth.
As for performance comparisons, Nvidia didn’t give us much to go on 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 it’s likely DLSS 4 and new AI features are playing a big role here.
“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.”
That does suggest that DLSS 4 has a big part to play in the RTX 5070’s comparative performance. At the beginning of the stream, Nvidia showed off a 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, and Huang alluded to in-shader AI acceleration to help spread the workload of the new AI systems.
As Huang notes, for every four frames in the scene, only one was rendered. The rest were generated by AI.
Availability for the RTX 50-series will be sometime this month.
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