The RTX 5090 was announced during Nvidia's CES 2025 keynote presentation in January, along with three other new GPUs to form the vanguard of the new RTX Blackwell series of graphics cards.
As well as significantly more CUDA cores, and a healthy dollop of extra GDDR7 memory, the RTX 5090 is also able to make use of the new DLSS 4 technology, which includes Multi Frame Generation. That's a Blackwell-exclusive feature which allows the card to generate up to three subsequent frames, using the power of AI, for every one frame generated via traditional compute methods.
This is how Nvidia's able to claim the RTX 5090 will perform at twice the level of the RTX 4090. Though, mostly only in the games and apps that support DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation.
The RTX 5090 release date is January 30, 2025. It will come in a shiny new Founders Edition form, which is significantly slimmer than the chonky cards that formed the RTX 4090 range. I would expect AIB cards to release the following day, and with the same old big boi shrouds that were used in the previous generation.
The rumoured specifications were pretty much bang on the money, with the RTX 5090 sporting 21,760 CUDA cores and 32 GB GDDR7 memory. The only thing which has been the subject of rampant speculation, and regularly changing specification, has been the TGP numbers. That has now settled on 575 W.
Thankfully the speculation that we would be seeing a huge price rise with the new RTX 50-series GPUs has largely proved false, with no $2,000+ Founders Edition on offer. The RTX 5090 will launch at $1,999, though that is still a good deal more than the RTX 4090, and you can bet AIBs will charge around $2,500 where it can.
