Nvidia announces GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards, starting at $549

After months of rumors, Nvidia debuted its latest generation of desktop and laptop graphics cards at CES 2025. The RTX 50-series is the fastest lineup of GPUs Nvidia has developed. Starting with its RTX 5070, Nvidia claims it delivers the equivalent performance to the previous generation’s top model, the RTX 4090, at just $549 instead of the 4090’s $1,599. Moving on up, the RTX 5070 Ti will cost $749, $999 for the RTX 5080, and $1,999 for the RTX 5090. All of these cards will be available starting later this month.

The RTX 50-series marks the jump to GDDR7 video memory (VRAM), which is both more powerful and power efficient than the GDDR6x utilized in most RTX 40-series cards. Chief among the new features in the RTX 50-series cards — aside from their horsepower increase — is DLSS 4. It builds on Nvidia’s previous iterations, all of which aim to increase gaming performance while making a series of visual trade-offs (i.e. lowering the render resolution, using AI to generate new frames to make games run smoother) that are becoming more and more difficult to spot as the tech improves. Nvidia touts that DLSS 4 taps into AI even more — generating 3 frames with trained AI for every 1 rendered on the GPU — to allow games to look better and run faster. Leaning so heavily on Tensor AI cores on the GPU is part of what makes Nvidia’s RTX 50-series more efficient, so says Nvidia.

It was a big day for new gaming GPUs, as AMD also announced some new hardware at CES. The company’s new RDNA 4 graphics architecture and FSR4 upscaling and frame generation tech will debut in graphics cards coming soon, including the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and the RX 9070. Pricing and availability haven’t been announced for these cards, though they’ll likely compete directly against the GPUs in Nvidia’s RTX 50-series lineup.