NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 And 5080 GPU Launch Timing Possibly Revealed

GeForce RTX graphics card on a black background.
There's been some mumbling that NVIDIA could announce its next-generation GeForce RTX 50 series before the end of the year, but that may not be the case. Instead, a prominent leaker on X/Twitter has thrown it out there that the first batch of gaming GPUs based on NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture—which has already released—could be revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January.

To put the timing into perspective, NVIDIA unveiled its GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080 graphics cards in September 2022, during its Project Beyond event at GTC, which kicked off an era of gaming on its Ada Lovelace architecture.

Before that, NVIDIA unveiled its Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3090, 3080, and 3070 in September 2020 during a special GeForce webcast that was chock-full of major announcements.

Giving the past two generational GeForce launches, it would be easy to assume that the GeForce RTX 50 series will be unveiled in September 2024. That's certainly a possibility, though Kopite7kimi on X/Twitter feels otherwise.

Post on X/Twitter regarding the GeForce RTX 50 series launch timing.

"I think we won't see RTX 50 until CES," Kopite7kimi stated on X/Twitter. In one of the replies, RedGamingTech was in agreement saying, "This is what I've been hearing too FWIW and reported in a few videos. Next year is looking very likely for launch."

Only NVIDIA knows for sure, and even so, company boss Jensen Huang is known to throw last-minute curve balls. That said, NVIDIA's dominance in the GPU space gives it flexibility in determining when and how to launch a next-generation product.

There's also the matter of market penetration, especially at the high end. According to latest Steam survey figures, less than 1% of gamers on the digital distribution platform are rocking a GeForce RTX 4090 (0.94%), and even fewer are running a GeForce RTX 4080 (0.77%) or GeForce RTX 4080 Super (0.34%). The top GPU, for anyone curious, is the GeForce RTX 3060 (5.66%) followed by the now-ancient GeForce GTX 1650 (4.16%).

A quick side note: Seasonic recently added several GeForce RTX 50 series cards to its online PSU calculator, which could indicate that a launch is looming sooner than later.  Make of that what you will.

Like everyone else, we're curious to see how beastly the GeForce RTX 5090 ends up being. There mere addition of Blackwell will give it a boost, and so should the move to GDDR7 memory. Beyond that, it's been rumored that the GeForce RTX 5090 could have a big bump to its base clock at almost 2,900MHz (versus 2,235MHz for the GeForce RTX 4090). We shall see, it's just a matter of when.