Nvidia announces GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards starting with the 5070 for $549

After months of rumors, Nvidia debuted its latest generation of graphics cards for desktops and laptops at CES 2025. The RTX 50 series is the fastest series of GPUs that Nvidia has developed. Starting with the RTX 5070, Nvidia claims it will deliver the same performance as the previous generation’s top model, the RTX 4090, for just $549 instead of the 4090’s $1,599. Moving on, the RTX 5070 Ti costs $749, $999 for the RTX 5080 and $1,999 for the RTX 5090. All of these tickets will be available later this month.

The RTX 50 series marks the jump to GDDR7 video memory (VRAM), which is both more powerful and more power efficient than the GDDR6x used in most RTX 40 series cards. Chief among the new features in the RTX 50 series cards – aside from the horsepower increase – is DLSS 4. It builds on Nvidia’s previous iterations, all of which aim to improve gaming performance while simultaneously make a series of visual compromises (i.e. lowering the display resolution, using AI to generate new frames to make games run more smoothly) that are becoming increasingly difficult to spot as technology improves. Nvidia touts that DLSS 4 makes even greater use of AI – generating 3 frames with trained AI for every 1 rendered on the GPU – to make games look better and run faster. Relying so heavily on Tensor AI cores on the GPU is part of what makes Nvidia’s RTX 50 series more efficient, Nvidia says.

It was a big day for new gaming GPUs, as AMD also announced new hardware at CES. The company’s new RDNA 4 graphics architecture and FSR4 upscaling and frame generation technology will soon debut in graphics cards including the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and the RX 9070. Pricing and availability have not been announced for these cards, although they will . likely to compete directly with the GPUs in Nvidia’s RTX 50 series.