While Nvidia hasn’t confirmed the release of its rumored new flagship GPU, the company’s recently shared news that CEO Jensen Huang is to deliver the keynote at CES 2025 – that’s 6:30 PM January 6 2025 – could hint at the highly-anticipated debut of the RTX 5090.
Rumors have been swirling about the RTX 5090’s specs, but Nvidia has remained excruciatingly tight-lipped. Huang’s CES keynote, his first for the major tech event held annually every January in Las Vegas, might be the moment we find out more. CES has long been the prime stage for major Nvidia announcements.
Nvidia cards are not always debuted in Las Vegas, of course. The GeForce RTX 40 series, for instance, debuted in September 2022. But the RTX 40 Super series and mobile versions did debut at (or around) CES, in 2023 and CES 2024 respectively. This pattern, plus Nvidia’s announcement of Huang’s keynote, could indicate that the rumors of a CES 2025 reveal for its new flagship series are in fact true.
Tune in to the #CES2025 opening keynote by our CEO Jensen Huang live in Las Vegas on Monday, January 6, at 6:30 p.m. PT. https://t.co/kMkKNXvRge pic.twitter.com/Adv1WfVPvjOctober 7, 2024
All aboard the hype train…
The RTX 5090 is rumored to feature the Blackwell GB202-300-A1 GPU with 21,760 CUDA cores – that’s over 30% more than the ultra-powerful RTX 4090’s 16,384 cores. Memory-wise, it could include 32GB of GDDR7 RAM on a 512-bit bus. Combined with a possible 28Gbps memory chip, this could result in a staggering 1.78TB/s of memory bandwidth, a 68% increase over the 1TB/s you get with the RTX 4090.
Another point of speculation is power consumption. Leaker kopite7kimi suggests the RTX 5090 could require up to a 600 Watt PSU (Power Supply Unit), significantly higher than the 4090’s 450W demands. That’s not wholly bad, since the 5090 is shaping up to be Nvidia’s most powerful GPU yet, but it does also mean gamers may have to shell out even more on a new PSU for their PC, and maybe even a new cooling system as well. And since the GPU itself is rumored to cost up to $2,000, you could be looking at an extremely expensive upgrade.
The best 4K graphics card of 2024I tried to break Nvidia ACE for laughs, but instead I got to see the strange new future of story-driven PC gamingI watched Nvidia’s Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold