It may seem like yesterday that Nvidia put out its GeForce RTX 40 series of graphics cards, but the company is now gearing up to release its RTX 50 series, based on its new “Blackwell” technology.
Actually, the technology company led by CEO Jensen Huang has revealed the upcoming GeForce RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 cards, after it previously revealed the high-end GeForce RTX 5090 at CES 2025.
The RTX 5090 is something of a beast as you can imagine, but the RTX 5080 also appears to be a very powerful graphics card, as according to Nvidia it will wipe the floor with its predecessor the RTX 4080 delivering twice the performance in games as seen in the chart below.
The upgraded tech specs of the RTX 5080 might be the reason, as the card boasts 10,752 CUDA cores (processing units which work in parallel to carry out computing tasks) vs the 9,728 of the RTX 4080. It also sports faster GDDR7 memory, although both cards have the same amount of memory (16 GB).
The new RTX 5080, of course, will also benefit from the latest version of Nvidia’s DLSS (which stands for “deep learning super sampling”). The new DLSS 4, AI-powered upscaling technology can provide a hefty frame rate increase, giving high-end gamers who go for the RTX 5080 card a more fluid experience in games. It should be noted, though, that DLSS 4 will also run on the earlier RTX 40 series cards too, but without the new multi-frame generation technique featured in DLSS 4.
The RTX 5080 could deliver huge performance gains according to Nvidia.
Nvidia has revealed a manufacturer’s suggested retail price or MSRP of $999 US dollars for the GeForce RTX 5080, a far more palatable price tag than the $1999 US dollars MSRP of the GeForce RTX 5090, but the RTX 5080 is also a high-end part aimed at 4K resolution gaming.
Then there’s the RTX 5070 Ti which also according to Nvidia will double the performance of its predecessor, the RTX 4070 Ti. Once again, the use of the new GDDR7 memory is a boost here, as the RTX 5070 Ti will boast almost 80 % more memory bandwidth than its predecessor, thanks to it using a 256-bit memory bus (the RTX 4070 Ti featured a 192-bit memory bus).
Also taking into account the RTX 5070 Ti card will ship with 16 GB of memory vs the RTX 4070 Ti means it should handily beat it at 4K gaming, but maybe the difference at 1440p resolution won’t be so dramatic though…
Nvidia has set a MSRP of $749 US dollars for the RTX 5070 Ti. The company’s own “Founders Edition” card will be available at this price, and although third-party card will probably be more expensive, those shopping for a RTX 5070 Ti will likely get a better deal than those hunting for the old RTX 4070 Ti only two years ago.
Also revealed by Nvidia was the RTX 5070, a card that has raised eyebrows as Nvidia claims it will outperform their former flagship card, the GeForce RTX 4090, for only $549 US dollars. Granted, the RTX 5070 should outperform its predecessor (the RTX 4070), and Nvidia is claiming a x2 fold increase in performance here too.
The RTX 5070 card, like the rest of the RTX 50 line, features the new “Blackwell” CUDA cores, 6,144 vs the 5,888 of its predecessor (which had the old “Ada Lovelace” cores). This is only a 4.3 % increase, though. Memory remains the same at 12 GB, also on a 192-bit bus, although the RAM is of the GDDR7 type like that of the other RTX 50 series cards.
Nvidia has listed prices for its upcoming GeForce RTX 50 series cards.
But the RTX 5070 beating the RTX 4090 seems unlikely if we look at the specs. This is because the latter not only boasts more teraflops of computing power (83 teraflops vs 31 teraflops), but also memory bandwidth (1008 GB/s vs 672 GB/s).
So if the RTX 5070 can somehow match the RTX 4090 this is likely to the use of AI trickery, but until the RTX 5070 is out in the wild and benchmarks begin to pop up on websites such as gpu.userbenchmark.com, the jury is out. What’s clear, though, is that this are certainly interesting times for those in the market for a new graphics card.
Note: The new GeForce cards will be available on January 30 (GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080) and February 2025 (GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070).
GeForce series 50 graphics cards (Nvidia Corporation)
GeForce RTX 5080, RTX 4080 benchmarks (Nvidia)