On the same day NVIDIA briefly became the most valuable company in the world, CEO Jensen Huang took the CES 2025 stage to announce the new, long-awaited Blackwell family of graphics cards. The first salvo of RTX 50 series GPUs arrives in January, with prices starting at $549 for the RTX 5070 and topping out at an eye-watering $1,999 for the flagship RTX 5090. Among them is the $749 RTX 5070 Ti and $999 RTX 5080 laptop variants of desktop GPUs will follow in March, with prices there starting at $1,299 for 5070 PCs equipped.

As for the specs, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition features 32GB of GDDR7 RAM and 21,760 CUDA cores. Depending on the game, NVIDIA says the 5090 will deliver as much as double the relative performance, with RT-intensive titles such as Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 saw the biggest gains. Later, for example, NVIDIA shared a video showing the game running at 242 frames per second on the 5090 compared to the relatively meager 109 fps on the RTX 4090.

Of course, the performance improvement that consumers can expect will depend, in large part, on whether a game supports NVIDIA’s new DLSS 4 technology. Looking at the performance charts shared by NVIDIA, games limited to DLSS 3 will see a smaller performance improvement. However, the good news is that older RTX GPUs will support DLSS 4, although the killing part of the tech, generation multi-frame, will be exclusive to the company’s new 50 series cards.

NVIDIA kicked off Blackwell’s portion of its CES presentation with a demo of the next-generation Assassin’s Creed game featuring the most realistic ray-traced graphics ever shown in the series. “All this, with AI, is the house GeForce built,” Huang said, wearing a new snakeskin-like jacket instead of his signature leather jacket. “Now, AI is coming home to GeForce.”

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