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Rumors and leaks are beginning to ramp up around the future release of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 series. Online, there are speculative reports and easy predictions about higher clock speeds and faster memory for the graphics cards, but an accidental leak from Seasonic has users questioning whether the power supply specification will be good enough.
Other hot online debates include arguments over the price or if there will be a delayed release into 2025.
Before you grab your digital pitchforks, let us round up the latest news to help you decide whether to stick with or twist the upgrade process for your PC.
What is the RTX 5000 Series?
Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series is the next generation of NVIDIA’s GeForce graphics cards, which need little introduction for gamers other than to expect advancements in performance and technology.
The RTX 5090, in particular, is expected to have 192 Streaming Multiprocessors and nearly 25,000 CUDA cores, which suggests a 33% performance improvement over the RTX 4000 series. Improvements to ray tracing are also expected.
When is the RTX 5000 Series Release Date?
Expected: January 7-10, 2025
The official release date of the RTX 5000 series is still unknown. Many initially believed that the graphics cards — also codenamed “Blackwell” — would appear later this year. However, online leakers suggest that NVIDIA will unveil everything at CES 2025 in January.
Nvidia watchers Team Green and kopite7kimi both agree on a 2025 release date, so all eyes will be on what NVIDIA announces from the Vegas show floor between January 7 and January 10, 2025.
I think we won’t see RTX 50 until CES.
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) July 22, 2024
RTX 5000 Series Specs
Before we go much further, here are the RTX 5000 models, again with an assist from various tweets from credible Twitter leaker @kopite7kimi:
| GPU | Variant | Variant | Variant |
| GB202 | Nvidia RTX 5090 | Nvidia RTX 5090 Ti | – |
| GB203 | Nvidia RTX 5080 | Nvidia RTX 5080 Ti |
Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti
|
| GB205 | Nvidia RTX 5070 | RTX 5060 Ti |
Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti
|
| GB206 | Nvidia RTX 5060 | Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti | – |
| GB207 | Nvidia RTX 5050 | Nvidia RTX 5050 Ti | – |
GB202 12*8 512-bit GDDR7
GB203 7*6 256-bit GDDR7
GB205 5*5 192-bit GDDR7
GB206 3*6 128-bit GDDR7
GB207 2*5 128-bit GDDR6— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) June 11, 2024
Focusing in on the RTX 5090, the graphics card is rumored to have 192 Streaming Multiprocessors and nearly 25,000 CUDA cores (Compute Unified Device Architecture), a huge increase over the previous generation. This increased CUDA core count may indicate that this will turn out to be quite a large leap in processing performance, with a potential improvement of up to 33 per cent over the flagship die of the RTX 4000 series.
On the memory front, the RTX 5090 and its other derivatives focused on improved performance need to have the latest GDDR7 (that’s SGRAM), which may improve data transfer speed pretty significantly. In that regard, lower-tiered variants like the RTX 5060 will be able to retain GDDR6 and show just how this series has become much more stratified across memory technologies.
There have been persistent rumors that TITAN AI GB202-based and the GeForce RTX 5090-based graphics cards could perform 63% and 48% better than the RTX 4090-based cards, respectively.
Rumours have indicated the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 are likely to launch with 28Gbps GDDR7, this is a major shame, as it seems 32-40Gbps GDDR7 is not that far behindhttps://t.co/p6HJg6bMES
— Charlie (@ghost_motley) July 30, 2024
The Nvidia 5000 series GPUs could also feature enhanced ray tracing capabilities and improved pricing relative to the performance of comparable models from previous generations.
RTX 5000 Graphics Cards Need More Power
The next-generation Nvidia RTX 5000 series graphics cards may need more power than their predecessors if information leaked accidentally by the power supply manufacturer Seasonic through their online calculator is anything to go by.
The leak revealed that almost all models increased their power requirements: the RTX 5090 went to 500W — an increase of 50W from the RTX 4090 — the RTX 5080 at 350W, an increase of 30W; the RTX 5070 at 220W, which increased another 20W; and finally, the RTX 5060 made a huge jump up to 170W with a significant increase of 55W.
It also confirms the existence of an RTX 5050 model, which did not exist in the 4000 series, running at 100W of consumption — actually running 30W lower than an RTX 3050.
RTX 5090 Price
Estimated Price: $1,599+
It’s safe to predict that the Blackwell generation will maintain the RTX series’ reputation for premium pricing.
While there is no formal launch pricing information just yet, we’d expect it to be above the $1,599 asking price of the RTX 4090.
As the price of high-end GPUs continues to rise, many within the tech community are calling on people to vote with their wallets to stem the increasing unaffordability of Nvidia’s products.
The Bottom Line
A lack of official information means that much of what is currently being debated online is on the speculative side. But it’s relatively easy to predict that we can expect a big unveiling of the RTX 5000 series on the Vegas show floors of CES in January.
We can also expect comparison slides showing higher clock speeds and faster memory, tempting users to hand over their money in unison.
Will you be able to justify spending well over $1,500 on an RTX 5090 from NVIDIA? It’s a tough question, especially when the GeForce RTX 4070 continues to deliver a powerful performance without breaking the bank.
But when it comes to tech, what we want and what we need are two very different things.
