CES 2025: NVIDIA announces the Blackwell line of video cards

NVIDIA really pushed the focus on AI during its keynote and they are looking to lead the way with their hardware to facilitate this era of computing. As one who's working on a few AI projects, I've used NVIDIA cards to power my AI programs and NVIDIA's hardware really helps deliver the performance I need for my programs.

During the keynote, Jensen showed off an impressive video that has AI to super power ray tracing. It's really a sight to behold and shows the power of AI and how it can help deliver high quality visuals at a fraction of the power needed if it was done in the traditional way.

DLSS Frame Generation moves from generating every other frame to being able to generate three now. Frame generation has been a pretty slick tech that was introduced with DLSS3, but with DLSS4 they are taking the next step. Touting up to 8X performance over rasterization, DLSS4 will combine Multi Frame Generation with a transformation based DLSS Ray Reconstruction and Super Resolution to generate an even better image that what we have today. To help with the increased latency, NVIDIA Reflex 2 will have what's called Frame Warp. The next frame will be generated based on the mouse input in order to provide a faster response and more accurate image to what a player does. All this will be possible on the next generation cards.

Blackwell is the name of the upcoming generation of cards, which the 5000 line will be based off of. The flagship card will be, of course, the GeForce RTX 5090. Consisting of 92 billion transistors, the card is capable of 380 RT TFLOPS and 125 Shader TFLOPS. That's double of Ada in RT performance and 150% better in Shader performance. Blackwell also performs 3X better than Ada Lovelace with 4000 AI TOPS. In terms of memory, we're talking 2X of Ada with 1.8 TB/s of memory bandwidth.

The design of the GeForce RTX 5090 looks similar to the previous two generations with a black accented casing that's more rounded. It does look like a dual slot card, which makes the width less than the 3 slot card of the RTX 4090 if what Jensen was holding was the RTX 5090.

NVIDIA didn't just announce the GeForce RTX 5090 though as three other cards were shown and all pricing was revealed. The GeForce RTX 5080 will have a performance of 1,800 AI TOPS. The GeForce RTX 5070 Ti will have a performance of 1,400 AI TOPS. It's interesting they are announcing a Ti version right away as that's usually later on down the line. And Jensen really touted the GeForce RTX 5070 as it's supposed to have the performance of a GeForce RTX 4090 at less than half the price.

Speaking of pricing, the GeForce RTX 5090 will come out at $1999, a $400 premium over the launch price of the RTX 4090. The GeForce RTX 5080 though will launch at $999, which is $200 less than what the RTX 4080 came out at. $749 will be the price of the RTX 5070 Ti, $50 less than the RTX 4070 TI launch price. Finally, the RTX 5070 will sell for $549, which is also $50 less than the launch price of the RTX 4070. Pricing seems really good for all the cards except the RTX 5090 as that was the only one with a price increase from the previous generation. If the RTX 5070 does perform at an RTX 4090 level with a price tag of $549, that's something I would consider a pretty impressive feat and one that could provide a huge bang for the buck for those who haven't updated to the Ada Lovelace cards yet.

Now, no other specs such as CUDA core count or memory amount was announced today, but there's been leaks of some of the cards packaging to hint at what they could be. Again, we'll have to see how they do once they are in reviewer hands, but I really liked everything announced today in terms of Blackwell, although that pricing on the GeForce RTX 5090 does give me a little pause. $2000 for a video card is a big ask, but then again it is the halo product and those who can afford it won't think twice about paying for the best out there.

Availability will start this month so you shouldn't have to wait long to get your hands on one and to see the reviews. Hopefully we'll get the rest of the specs soon, but for now, it seems NVIDIA might have a lot of solid offerings for gamers in the coming months.