Nvidia announces RTX 50 series graphics cards with DLSS 4 multiframe generation

As predicted, Nvidia has unveiled its new RTX 50 series desktop graphics cards at its CES 2025 keynote, which took place in the early hours UK time. The current lineup includes four cards: a $1999/£1939 RTX 5090, a $999/£979 RTX 5080, a $749/£729 RTX 5070 Ti and a $549/£539 RTX 5070. Each “Blackwell” graphics card is equipped with GDDR7 memory, some impressive frame-rate requirements and DLSS 4 multi frame generation. The two top-end cards will arrive on January 30, while the upper-mid range offerings are slated for February.

The “relative performance” claims for some of these graphics cards are wild, so let’s start with an idea of ​​expected frame rates for each card and a quick explanation of DLSS 4 multiframe generation before we cover the architectural improvements.

The $1999 RTX 5090 is unsurprisingly positioned as the ultimate graphics card, a prosumer model with 32GB of GDDR7. It is based on the GB202 GPU with 92 billion transistors, compared to 76 billion on the 4090, and includes 21760 CUDA cores. Nvidia’s slides promise twice the frame rates of the RTX 4090, or a comfortable 4K 240Hz with full RT and maximum settings in games that support the MFG function (multi frame generation).

To explain before we go any further, MFG adds up to three generated frames for every traditionally rendered frame. This results in higher frame rates and therefore visual fluidity, but not necessarily higher performance as we typically call it, since latency is dependent on the “base” frame-rate rather than the final “output” frame-rate. The concept is similar to the original frame generation (FG) feature on RTX 40 series cards and as such relies on developer integration and Nvidia’s Reflex 2 lag reduction technology to work well.

Surprisingly, while the RTX 5090 has a rated total graphics power of 575W – right up against the PCIe 5.0 600W limit and 125W higher than the RTX 4090 – the Founders Edition design is actually slimmer than the RTX 4090 FE. It’s a two-slot card that can actually fit into small form factor PC cases (with the necessary 1000W PSUs), with two flow-through fans and the PCB located in the middle. It will be fascinating to see how the new design fares, given that early 5090 prototype coolers were reportedly quad-slot behemoths!

The $999 RTX 5080 is designed to double the frame rate of the RTX 4080, with Nvidia promising more than 2x results in games like Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, and Black Myth: Wukong — all RT-heavy titles. The 5080 is based on the smaller GB203 die and comes with 16GB GDDR7, 10752 CUDA cores and a rated power of 360W – with an 850W PSU recommended. The price matches the RTX 4080 Super, so it will be interesting to see how these models compare in terms of apples-to-apples performance when not using the FG or MFG.

The two February cards, the RTX 5070 Ti 16GB and 5070 12GB, hit $749 and $549 price points. The 5070 Ti uses a cut-back version of the GB203 GPU with 8960 CUDA cores, while the 5070 uses the GB205 with 6144 cores. It’s disappointing to see 12GB of GDDR7 on the $549 RTX 5070 card in our Lord’s year 2025, but Nvidia would have had to equip the 5070 with a 256-bit bus (or use a mixed VRAM allocation) to reach 16 GB, so the move is not unexpected.

In terms of performance, it’s the same theme: the 5070 Ti is meant to double the frame rate of the 4070 Ti, while the 5070 does the same for the 4070. However, Nvidia also pointed out that this means the 5070 should therefore offer the same frame rates as the RTX 4090 which would be a huge bargain at about a third of the price! Given that this is based on an uneven MFG vs FG comparison, we’ll have to wait for proper third-party testing to see if this claim is really confirmed and what the difference looks like in non-FG and indeed non-DLSS/non – RT titles.

In addition to confirming its desktop lineup, Nvidia also announced the RTX 50 series of portable GPUs. These come from March and include smaller memory allocations. These include the RTX 5090 24GB, RTX 5080 16GB, RTX 5070 Ti 12GB and RTX 5070 8GB.

Now that we’ve covered the range, it’s worth quickly mentioning some of the architectural changes that contribute to both faster overall performance and the key gains in terms of RT and AI performance. These improvements are derived from more powerful SMs with more throughput and tighter Tensor core integration, improvements to shader execution reordering, and acceleration for FP4 computation. Also needed is improved hardware flip metering for multiframe gen, new RT cores with double beam triangle intersection speed, and better compression. The cards also support the PCIe 5.0 interface and come with DisplayPort 2.1b UHBR20 ports to match AMD’s previous-gen cards.

If you are interested in learning more about the Blackwell architecture, Nvidia’s blog has more details on these architectural details, and we expect the usual tech press like Gamers Nexus or TechSpot to offer more detailed breakdowns of these changes once they’ve had a chance to digest the information.

In terms of our output, we expect to release more information about the DLSS 4 multi frame generation in the near future, so stay tuned, and of course we’re eager to put the new GPUs through our refined test suite as soon as possible.