Rumors about Nvidia’s upcoming 5000-series GPUs have been gaining momentum for quite some time now, and as the months of 2024 roll on, we’re hearing more and more as the rumor mill picks up speed.
Current Nvidia Lovelace RTX graphics cards have offered mixed performance results; while premium mid-range and enthusiast models have generally excelled, high prices have kept more expensive cards from reaching many gamers.
So it's no surprise that there's a lot of excitement, as well as caution, about what to expect from Nvidia's best Blackwell-generation graphics cards, next-gen GPUs (headlined by the RTX 5090) that may or may not be on the horizon by the end of the year.
In this article, we'll round up all the key release date rumors and other news that continue to circulate ahead of the Nvidia 5000 series announcement, updating you with all the new details as we hear them.
Nvidia 5000 Series: Let's Get Down to Business
- What is it? Nvidia is rumored to launch its next generation of RTX graphics cards
- How much does it cost? It's unknown at this time, but it will likely scale similarly to Nvidia Lovelace GPUs in price.
- When can I get it? The earliest we expect to see the Nvidia RTX 5000 series would be late 2024 or early 2025.
Nvidia 5000 Series: Latest News
Load more of the latest Nvidia RTX 5000 series news…
Nvidia 5000 Series: Release Date
Obviously, we don't know for sure when Nvidia will release its next generation of GPUs, but there is some educated speculation we can make at this point based on past practices and rumors that have made their way into the public conversation.
For one, Nvidia tends to follow an 18-24 month release cadence for its graphics cards, and with the global chip shortage easing, we don't expect to see any delays that push this schedule back.
That would put the Nvidia 5000 series launch sometime towards the end of 2024 or early 2025 at the latest. In the past, rumors have tended to gravitate towards a late 2024 launch, but more recent speculation is starting to suggest an early 2025 launch (likely at CES). Be that as it may, rumors are also pointing to a pair of initial graphics cards from Blackwell: the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 (though the latter may arrive just before the flagship).
Nvidia RTX 5000 Series: Specifications
Nvidia's RTX 5000 series GPUs will be based on Nvidia's Blackwell architecture.
According to a leak on Chinese hardware forum Chiphell, backed by well-known online leaker Kopite7kimi, Nvidia’s next-gen GPU series will undergo a numbering shuffle of sorts. The purported GPU variants, which will be at the heart of Nvidia’s graphics cards and the best gaming laptops running Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs, will include:
- GB202: Probably on the Nvidia RTX 5090 and Nvidia RTX 5090 Ti
- GB203: Probably the Nvidia RTX 5080 and Nvidia RTX 5080 Ti, but possibly the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti as well.
- GB205: Probably on the Nvidia RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 Ti, and possibly the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti
- GB206: Probably on the Nvidia RTX 5060 and possibly the Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti
- GB207: Probably reserved for Nvidia RTX 5050 and Nvidia RTX 5050 Ti
In the past, we’ve heard rumors that Nvidia would eventually switch some of its Blackwell GPUs to a multi-chiplet module (MCM) design, following in the footsteps of AMD and Intel. However, it’s unclear whether this will include Nvidia’s 5000-series GPUs, as rumors only specified the GB100 GPU, which is a commercial-grade chip for servers, data centers, and industrial use.
At this point, it seems unlikely for GeForce cards, but still, an MCM GPU from Nvidia could provide a huge performance boost if done right, and given that arch-rival AMD is already using MCM in its GPUs, Nvidia can't afford to be left behind here.
We’ve also seen some purported RTX 5090 specs from Chiphell forum user Panzerlied, a fairly reliable hardware leaker. According to a now-deleted post, the RTX 5090 will feature some impressive spec upgrades over the RTX 4090:
| Specifications | RTX 4090 | RTX 5090 |
|---|---|---|
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 128 | 192 |
| CUDA Cores | 16.384 | 24.576 |
| Ray tracing cores | 128 | 192 |
| Tensor cores | 512 | 768 |
| Increase the clock | 2.52 GHz | 2.9 GHz |
| L2 Cache | 72 MB | 128 MB |
| memory bandwidth | 1.008 GB/s | 1.532 GB/s |
If these specs hold true, this should give the RTX 5090 an absolutely massive boost from generation to generation, and the same post detailing the specs claims that the RTX 5090's performance was 1.7x faster than the RTX 4090, which is truly astounding.
Other rumors have indicated a slightly smaller improvement for the RTX 5090, around 50% or 60%, but let's be real: that would still represent a massive improvement.
We're also expecting a 28GB VRAM loadout (with a 448-bit memory bus), in case you had any doubts about what a monster GPU Blackwell's flagship could be.
With a potential launch looming, we bet we'll be hearing more spec rumors before long and will bring you the latest updates as they happen.
