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In March 2024, Nvidia announced the Blackwell architecture for its datacenter products. Like Ampere, Blackwell is a shared architecture between both consumer and datacenter products rather than distinct architectures released simultaneously like Ada Lovelace for consumers and Hopper for datacenter.
At the Game Awards in December 2024, a cinematic trailer for The Witcher IV was shown which had been pre-rendered on an "unannounced Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU". This was assumed to be an upcoming GeForce 50 series GPU.[1][2] Following the RTX 50 series announcement, Nvidia confirmed that the trailer was "pre-rendered in Unreal Engine 5 on a GeForce RTX 5090".[3] Later in the same month, it was reported that Nvidia had begun stockpiling GeForce 50 series units in U.S. warehouses due to the looming potential of tariffs.[4][5]Donald Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign floated a blanket 10% tariff on all imports and a 60% tariff on imports from China.[6][7]
On January 6, 2025, the GeForce 50 series was officially announced for both desktop and mobile devices during Nvidia's CES keynote in Las Vegas.[8] The pricing announcement was met with surprise as the RTX 5080 at $999 was the same price that the RTX 4080 Super released at a year earlier despite the anticipated price increases.[9] Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed that the RTX 5070 could reach "RTX 4090 performance at $549" despite a reliance on DLSS 4 upscaling and multi-frame generation rather than a direct comparison of raw compute.[10]
The GeForce 50 series is powered by the Blackwell microarchitecture which continues Ada Lovelace's emphasis on high graphics frequencies and large L2 caches. The Blackwell architecture introduces Nvidia RTX's fourth-generation RT cores for hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing and fifth-generation Tensor Cores for AI compute and performing floating-point calculations.[11]
RTX 50 series GPUs are the first consumer GPUs to feature GDDR7 video memory for greater memory bandwidth over the same bus width compared to the GDDR6 and GDDR6X memory used in the GeForce 40 series. RTX 50 series desktop GPUs use GDDR7 modules from Samsung due to them being available for validation earlier than modules from SK Hynix and Micron.[12][13]
12V2×6 connector
The GeForce 50 series uses the 16-pin 12V2×6 connector which is a revision of the 12VHPWR connector featured on the GeForce 40 series. There were problems with the 12VHPWR connector melting on some RTX 4090 GPUs due to the connector not being fully seated and connector design flaws that did not implement a high enough safety and error tolerance.[14] The 12V2×6 connector revision, published by PCI-SIG in July 2023, addressed this by shortening the four sense pins so the connector will not push any power if it has not been fully seated.[15] The 12VHPWR design would still draw up to 150W of power even if the sense pins were not making full contact. 12V2×6 is backwards compatible with existing 12VHPWR cables and adapters.
Nvidia has mandated to its AIB partners that the 16-pin 12V2×6 connector be used on all RTX 50 series designs.[16] With the GeForce 40 series, the 12VHPWR connector was only mandated on higher power cards such as the RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 while RTX 4060, RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070 AIB designs had the option of using 8-pin PCIe connectors. The 600W-capable 12VHPWR connector would not have been necessary on sub-200W cards.
The fourth generation of Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) was unveiled alongside the RTX 50 series. DLSS 4 upscaling uses a new vision transformer-based model for enhanced image quality with reduced ghosting and greater image stability in motion compared to the previous convolutional neural network (CNN) model.[17] DLSS 4 also allows a greater number of frames to be generated and interpolated based on a single traditionally rendered frame. This form of frame generation called Multi-Frame Generation is exclusive to the RTX 50 series while the GeForce 40 series is limited to one interpolated frame per traditionally rendered frame. Nvidia claims that DLSS 4's frame generation model uses 30% less video memory with the example of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide using 400MB less memory at 4K resolution with frame generation enabled.[18] Nvidia claims that 75 titles will integrate DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation at launch, including Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Star Wars Outlaws.[19]
The RTX 50 series includes DisplayPort 2.1b UHBR20 (80Gbps) with higher display output data rates to support high resolution and high refresh rate displays.[20] The GeForce 40 series received criticism for only including DisplayPort 1.4a (32Gbps) while the competing RadeonRX 7000 series included DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR13.5 (54Gbps). At CES 2025, VESA announced a collaboration with Nvidia on the new DP80LL ("low loss") UHBR20 active cable standard.[21] DP80LL allows for 80Gbps DisplayPort 2.1 cables up to 3 meters long as passive DP80 cables are limited in length due to signal integrity concerns.
The RTX 50 series introduces the ninth-generation NVENC encoder and sixth-generation NVDEC video decoder. For the first time in a consumer GeForce GPU, support is adding for encoding and decoding video in the 4:2:2 color format for professional-grade higher color depth.[22]
GeForce 50 series desktop GPUs are the second consumer GPUs to utilize a PCIe 5.0 interface[23] and the first to feature GDDR7 video memory.[24] They are fabricated by TSMC using a further refined custom 4 nm node dubbed 4NP.[11]
^Pixel fillrate is calculated as the number of render output units (ROPs) multiplied by the base (or boost) core clock speed.
^Texture fillrate is calculated as the number of texture mapping units (TMUs) multiplied by the base (or boost) core clock speed.
Mobile
Laptops featuring GeForce 50 series laptop GPUs were shown at CES 2025. Laptops with RTX 50 series GPUs were paired with IntelArrow Lake-HX and AMD Strix Point and Fire Range CPUs.[25][26] Nvidia claims that Blackwell architecture's new Max-Q features can increase battery life by up to 40% over GeForce 40 series laptops.[27] For example, Advanced Power Gating saves power by turning off areas of the GPU that are unused and the paired GDDR7 memory can run in an "ultra" low-voltage state.[28] Initial RTX 50 series laptops will become available in March 2025 starting at $1,299.[29]
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