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Want an RTX 5090? Prepare to wait a little longer

RTX 4090.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Nvidia’s upcoming top GPU is taking its sweet time to make it to the market, and by the sound of it, we won’t see it anytime soon. According to a new report from Benchlife, as well as various other sources, Nvidia is planning to unveil the RTX 50-series at CES 2025 in January. This means that the RTX 5090 is unlikely to make an appearance any sooner than three to four months from now. On the upside, we just learned even more about what the card’s going to offer.

After a few months of managing expectations, many GPU enthusiasts no longer expect the RTX 50-series to be released this year — and leakers agree. Following the huge specification leak we got yesterday, at least two new publications (both Benchlife and The Verge) are now claiming that Nvidia won’t announce its next-gen GPUs until 2025. Reputable hardware leakers like kopite7kimi have also previously said that early 2025 is the current target.

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If you asked me at the beginning of 2024, I’d have expected to see the RTX 5090 hitting the shelves around October. And it’s not just Nvidia. The general expectation was that we’d see all three GPU manufacturers — AMD, Nvidia, and Intel — launch their new graphics cards in 2024. However, for months now, we’ve been getting signs that this might turn out to be a disappointing year for PC hardware. The year might come to an end with next to no GPU releases outside of the RTX 40-series refresh and AMD’s RX 7600 XT. There was also the RX 7900 GRE, but that’s a 2023 GPU that only got a worldwide release earlier this year.

The RTX 4090 sitting alongside the Fractal Terra case.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

The release date reports are disappointing, but not at all surprising. The good news is that the spec leak from yesterday opened the floodgates on what else we can expect from the RTX 5090. For starters, Nvidia is said to be switching to the PCIe 5.0 interface, which means that you’ll need a recent processor and a solid motherboard with PCIe Gen 5 support to make the most of the GPU.

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We’re also going to see an upgrade to a DisplayPort 2.1a connection with full support for UHBR20, which stands for ultra-high bit rate and delivers much higher bandwidth than its predecessor. The card is also said to come with a 14-layer printed circuit board (PCB). Yesterday, we learned that the RTX 5090 will sport 21,760 CUDA cores, a 512-bit memory bus, and 32GB of GDDR7 memory. Remember that all of this is unconfirmed, so don’t take any of that information for granted.

Not getting the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080 released this year means that Nvidia may miss out on an important opportunity. The final quarter of the year is typically the best one for PC sales, and we’ve gotten used to seeing new Nvidia GPUs around that time during the RTX generations. However, with rumors saying that Nvidia is only now getting close to finalizing the specs for its flagship card, it feels like all hope of a 2024 launch is gone at this point — but we won’t know anything for certain until Nvidia itself makes an announcement.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
We have bad news about the RTX 5090
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We've been expecting Nvidia to launch its RTX 50-series GPUs, starting with the RTX 5090, in the back half of this year. However, a credible hardware leaker says the timeline is slipping. According to the leaker, Nvidia won't launch the RTX 5090 until the beginning of 2025.

The news comes from kopite7kimi on X (formerly Twitter), who says they think that the RTX 50-series won't launch until CES 2025, which takes place in January. Although it's uncharacteristic for Nvidia to launch a new generation of desktop GPUs at the annual trade show, time is running out for RTX 50-series GPUs -- code-named Blackwell -- to show up this year.

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The intel comes from kopite7kimi -- a frequent leaker in the GPU space, who has now said that not only will it take a while for most of the lineup to arrive but also that the GB203 GPU will be significantly cut down compared to previous rumors. Many suspect that the GB203 will be the GPU inside the RTX 5080, so this is a rather big deal.

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But that's all speculation until Nvidia shows us what it's been working on. If you want to be there when the news drops about just how powerful (and maybe affordable?) these cards actually are, here's how to watch the RTX 40 Super launch.
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