Nvidia announces RTX 50-series graphics cards with DLSS 4

Nvidia today announced the GeForce RTX 50 series, the company’s next generation of desktop and mobile graphics processors. Based on the latest Blackwell architecture, the product stack currently includes the RTX 5090, the RTX 5080, the RTX 5070 Ti, and the RTX 5070 in both desktop and mobile variants.

The four GPUs have obvious spec differences but let’s focus on things that are common first. All new Blackwell GPUs are built on the TSMC 4NP process. They feature new 5th generation Tensor cores and 4th generation ray tracing cores. There’s a newer 9th gen NVENC encoder and 6th gen NVDEC decoder.

All four announced models feature faster GDDR7 memory. Connectivity has improved, with all cards supporting PCIe 5.0 along with the latest DisplayPort 2.1b UHBR20 (80Gbps) and HDMI 2.1b (48Gbps). All 50-series cards will also support DLSS 4 along with an upcoming Reflex 2 with Frame Warp.

The flagship RTX 5090 has 32% more CUDA cores than the RTX 4090 with 154% higher AI TOPS and 66% higher ray tracing TFLOPS. You also get 8GB more video memory that’s also faster on a 512-bit memory bus. Power consumption has also gone up, with Nvidia targeting 575W for the 5090 although the new Founder’s Edition card somehow only uses a dual-slot design with double flow-through fans.

The RTX 5090 comes in at an eye-watering $1999, 33% more than the RTX 4090 price. It will be available starting January 30.

The RTX 5080 features a modest 5% increase in CUDA core count over the 4080 Super and similarly smaller increases comparatively in Tensor and ray tracing performance over the 5090. Memory also remains at 16GB but with faster GDDR7 on the same 256-bit memory bus. As you can imagine, power has also seen a relatively small increase, going from 320W of the 4080 Super to 360W.

The RTX 5080 is priced at $999, the same as the RTX 4080 Super and less than the $1199 launch price of the RTX 4080. The 5080 will also be available starting January 30.

Finally, the RTX 5070 Ti comes in at $749, $50 less than the launch prices of the 4070 Ti and the 4070 Ti Super while the RTX 5070 comes in at $549, $50 less than the 4070 Super and same as the 4070. The 5070 Ti and the 5070 will be available in February.

Nvidia also announced DLSS 4, which is the latest generation of Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling image reconstruction technique. The main new component of DLSS 4 is multi-frame generation, which goes from inserting a single AI generated frame to generating and inserting three AI generated frames between every two traditionally generated frames. The technique leverages the significantly improved Tensor processing of the 50-series cards to generate these new frames with higher precision and quality than before. As such, this feature is only available on the 50-series cards.

However, Nvidia is also improving the DLSS experience on older RTX cards. A new enhanced single frame generation feature improves the quality of the single-frame frame generation feature on RTX 50 and 40-series cards, which increases the frame rate further while also reducing VRAM usage.

The company is also switching away from CNN-based model to transformer-based model for features such as ray reconstruction, super resolution, and DLAA. The result is an image with greater image detail and more temporal stability, reducing artifacts such as ghosting, aliasing, and smearing in reconstructed images. These new DLSS 4 enhancements are coming to all RTX cards, all the way back to 20-series. Users can also just enable these features in existing games through the Nvidia app without having to wait for game updates.

DLSS 4 with multi-frame generation will be available in 75 apps and games, including Unreal Engine 5, on day 0. Users can also enable this feature in games that haven’t been updated through the Nvidia app using the new DLSS Override feature.