# GeForce 50 Series

The GeForce RTX 50 Series is a series of consumer graphics processing units designed by Nvidia. Announced at CES 2025, it will debut with the release of the RTX 5080 on January 21, 2025.

## Background

On September 20, 2022, Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 40 Series powered by the Ada Lovelace architecture. The Ada Lovelace architecture implemented increased graphics frequencies and a significantly larger L2 cache to compensate for narrower memory bus widths. On October 12, 2022, the GeForce RTX 40 Series debuted with the flagship RTX 4090 at $1,599. The rest of the RTX 40 Series released between November 2022 and June 2023 to mixed reviews. The RTX 4080 and RTX 4090's performance were commended but the entire RTX 40 Series was criticized for its high prices and weaker value over the RTX 30 Series. Nvidia responded to the pricing criticism in January 2024 with the release of the RTX 40 Super series refresh with three SKUs: the RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super. The three SKUs were introduced at the same price as their non-Super counterparts with the RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080 Super replacing the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080 respectively.
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 RTX 50 Series GPU. Later in the same month, it was reported that Nvidia had begun stockpiling RTX 50 Series units in U.S. warehouses due to the looming potential of tariffs. Donald Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign floated a blanket 10% tariff on all imports and a 60% tariff on imports from China. The world's most advanced semiconductor fabrication takes place by TSMC in Taiwan while necessary PCB and heatsink manufacturing and final product assembly takes place in China.

### Announcement

On January 6, 2025, the GeForce RTX 50 Series was officially announced for both desktop and mobile during Nvidia's CES keynote in Las Vegas.

## Features

* Up to 21,760 CUDA cores
* Up to 32 GB of GDDR7 VRAM
* PCIe 5.0 interface
* DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1a display connectors

### Blackwell architecture

The GeForce RTX 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 fifth generation Tensor Cores for AI compute and performing floating-point calculations.

### GDDR7

| Bus width | Theoretical bandwidth (GB/s) | Theoretical bandwidth (GB/s) |
| Bus width | GDDR6X (21 Gbps) | GDDR7 (28 Gbps) |
| 256-bit | 672 | 896 |
| 384-bit | 1,008 | 1,536 |
| 512-bit | 1,344 | 1,792 |
GeForce 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 RTX 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.

### 12V2×6 connector

The GeForce RTX 50 Series uses the 16-pin 12V2×6 connector which is a revision of the 12VHPWR connector featured on the RTX 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. 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. 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. With the RTX 40 Series, the 12VHPWR connector was only mandated on higher power SKUs 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 SKUs.

### DLSS 4

The fourth generation of Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) was unveiled alongside the GeForce RTX 50 Series. DLSS 3 upscaling and frame generation was exclusive to RTX 40 Series GPUs.

### I/O

The GeForce RTX 50 Series includes DisplayPort 2.1a with higher display output data rates to support high resolution and high refresh rate displays. The RTX 40 Series received criticism for only including DisplayPort 1.4 (32Gbps) while the competing Radeon RX 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. 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.

## Products
### Desktop

GeForce RTX 50 Series desktop GPUs are the first consumer GPUs to utilize a PCIe 5.0 interface and GDDR7 video memory.
| SKU | Release date | Launch MSRP (USD) | GPU Die | Transistors (billion) | Die size | Core | Core | SMs | Cache | Cache | Memory | Memory | Memory | Memory | Memory | Fillrate | Fillrate | Processing power (TFLOPS) | Processing power (TFLOPS) | Processing power (TFLOPS) | Processing power (TFLOPS) | Interface | TDP |
| SKU | Release date | Launch MSRP (USD) | GPU Die | Transistors (billion) | Die size | Config | Clock (MHz) | SMs | L1 | L2 | Type | Size | Clock (Gb/s) | Band- width (GB/s) | Bus width | Pixel (Gpx/s) | Texture (Gtex/s) | FP16 | FP32 | FP64 | Tensor compute [sparse] | Interface | TDP |
| GeForce RTX 5070 | | $549 | GB205-300 | | mm$^2$ | 6,144 192:96:48:192 | | 48 | 6 MB | MB | GDDR7 | 12 GB | 28.0 | 672 | 192-bit | | | | | | | PCIe 5.0 x16 | 250 W |
| GeForce RTX 5070 Ti | | $749 | GB203-300 | | 377 mm$^2$ | 8,960 280:140:70:280 | | 70 | 8.75 MB | MB | GDDR7 | 16 GB | 28.0 | 896 | 256-bit | | | | | | | PCIe 5.0 x16 | 300 W |
| GeForce RTX 5080 | Jan 21, 2025 | $999 | GB203-400 | | 377 mm$^2$ | 10,752 336:168:84:336 | | 84 | 10 MB | MB | GDDR7 | 16 GB | 30.0 | 1024 | 256-bit | | | | | | | PCIe 5.0 x16 | 360 W |
| GeForce RTX 5090 | | $1,999 | GB202-300 | 92 | 744 mm$^2$ | 21,760 680:340:170:680 | | 170 | 21.25 MB | MB | GDDR7 | 32 GB | 28.0 | 1,792 | 512-bit | | | | | | | PCIe 5.0 x16 | 575 W |
* ↑ 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.
* ↑ CUDA Cores Texture Mapping Units : Render Output Units : Ray Tracing Cores : Tensor Cores
* ↑ Core boost values (if available) are stated below the base value in italics.

## Reference(s)

* ↑ James, Dave (January 8, 2024). "Nvidia's officially announced the three RTX 40-series Super cards, with either a $200 price cut or a decent performance boost". PC Gamer. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ Judd, Will (January 8, 2024). "Nvidia announces RTX 4080 Super, 4070 Ti Super and 4070 Super graphics cards". Eurogamer. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ Chacos, Brad (December 13, 2024). "Nvidia stokes RTX 50-series hype with Witcher 4 and a global LAN party". PCWorld. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ Nasir, Hassan (December 13, 2024). "Nvidia teases RTX 50 Blackwell Gaming GPUs for launch next month — The Witcher IV's first cinematic trailer likely leveraged the upcoming RTX 5090". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ Zuhair, Muhammad (December 26, 2024). "Nvidia & AMD Rush To Ship Out Next-Gen GPUs To Avoid Trump Tariffs; GeForce RTX 5090 Estimated To Cost $2,500+". Wccftech. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ Garreffa, Anthony (December 26, 2024). "AMD and Nvidia ship next-gen gaming GPUs from China to US before Jan 20 to escape tariffs". TweakTown. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ Arantani, Lauren (October 15, 2024). "Trump vows to impose tariffs as experts warn of price hikes and angry allies". The Guardian. Retrieved January 6, 2025. Trump is proposing an at least 10% blanket tariff on all imports, with tariffs as high as 60% on goods from China.
* ↑ Chu, Ben (October 15, 2024). "Would Donald Trump's tariffs hurt US consumers?". BBC News. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ "Nvidia reportedly prioritizes Samsung GDDR7 memory for desktop GeForce RTX 50 series". VideoCardz. November 25, 2024. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ Mujtaba, Hassan (November 25, 2024). "Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" GPUs Reportedly Utilize Samsung's GDDR7 Memory Chips". Wccftech. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ Mah Ung, Gordon (June 15, 2023). "Melting GeForce RTX 4090 power cables: A timeline of events". PCWorld. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ Liu, Zhiye (July 3, 2023). "16-Pin Power Connector Gets A Much-Needed Revision, Meet The New 12V-2x6 Connector". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ Campbell, Mark (February 19, 2024). "Nvidia to mandate 16-pin PCIe 6.0 power with RTX 50 series "Blackwell" GPUs". OC3D. Retrieved January 6, 2025.
* ↑ "VESA to Update DisplayPort 2.1 with New Active Cable Specification for Up to 3x Longer DP80 Cables". VESA (Press release). January 6, 2025. Retrieved January 6, 2025.