Here's NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090 In The Flesh At CES 2025

Arguably the biggest announcement at CES 2025 was NVIDIA's debut of the GeForce RTX 50 series, led by the flagship GeForce RTX 5090. This card defies expectations in a lot of ways; even though the rest of the GeForce RTX 50 series is made up of largely incremental upgrades over the GeForce RTX 40 series—based on the specs, anyway—the GeForce RTX 5090 is a gigantic leap over the already unbelievable RTX 4090.


That includes not only performance specifications like the 1.8TB/second of memory bandwidth or the 1.6 tera-texels per second texture fill rate, but also the eye-opening 575W power spec for the new card, fully 125W higher than the GeForce RTX 4090. Despite that, though, the new GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition card from NVIDIA is a quite trim and stylish-looking two-slot card. For comparison's sake, the GeForce RTX 4090's stock cooler extends well into the third expansion slot and threatens a fourth.



 We haven't gone hands-on with the RTX 5090 yet, and we probably wouldn't be able to tell you about it yet, even if we had. However, we did spot one on display in NVIDIA's booth at CES 2025. The card is poised on a slanted post in the middle of the floor, as if it were a mystical artifact for onlookers to worship. Frankly, the two-thousand dollar GPU is not too far from that status for most PC gamers.


We're very curious to see the end result of NVIDIA's hard work on the Blackwell GPU architecture, and also eager to find out if that relatively modest two-slot cooler can actually tame the 575W beast that the GeForce RTX 5090 apparently is. You'll know about it as soon as we can tell you, so stay tuned for the HotHardware review of NVIDIA's latest and greatest.