NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 graphics card costs $2,000

On the same day that NVIDIA briefly became the world’s most valuable company, CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at CES 2025 to announce the company’s new and long-awaited Blackwell family of graphics cards. The first salvo of RTX 50 series GPUs will arrive in January, with pricing starting at $549 for the RTX 5070 and peaking at $1,999 for the flagship RTX 5090. In between is the RTX 5070 Ti at $749 and the RTX 5080 at $999. Desktop GPU variants for laptops will follow in March, with pricing starting at $1,299. for PCs equipped with the 5070.

As for specifications, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition will feature 32GB of GDDR7 RAM and 21,760 CUDA cores. Depending on the game, NVIDIA claims the 5090 will deliver up to two times the relative performance, with RT-intensive titles like Alan wakes up 2 And Cyberpunk 2077 seeing the biggest gains. In the latter, for example, NVIDIA shared a video showing the game running at 242 frames per second on the 5090, compared to a relatively paltry 109 fps on the RTX 4090.

Of course, the performance boost consumers can expect will largely depend on whether or not a game supports NVIDIA’s new DLSS 4 technology. Looking at the performance charts shared by NVIDIA, games limited to DLSS 3 will see less of a performance boost. However, the good news is that older RTX GPUs will support DLSS 4, although the technology’s flagship feature, multi-frame generation, will be exclusive to the company’s new 50 series cards.

NVIDIA kicked off the Blackwell portion of its CES presentation with a demo of a next-generation Assassin’s Creed game featuring the most realistic ray-traced graphics the series has ever featured. “All of this, with AI, is the house that GeForce built,” Huang said, wearing a new snakeskin jacket instead of his signature leather jacket. “Now AI is coming back to GeForce.”

Development…