We have bad news about the RTX 5090

We’ve been expecting Nvidia to launch its RTX 50-series GPUs, starting with the RTX 5090, in the back half of this year. However, a credible hardware leaker says the timeline is slipping. According to the leaker, Nvidia won’t launch the RTX 5090 until the beginning of 2025.

The news comes from kopite7kimi on X (formerly Twitter), who says they think that the RTX 50-series won’t launch until CES 2025, which takes place in January. Although it’s uncharacteristic for Nvidia to launch a new generation of desktop GPUs at the annual trade show, time is running out for RTX 50-series GPUs — code-named Blackwell — to show up this year.

I think we won't see RTX 50 until CES.

— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) July 22, 2024

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Nvidia typically announces new generations at its Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) during the fall. Nvidia holds one of these events each year in the spring, focused on AI and its enterprise efforts. However, on years where we see a new generation of desktop graphics cards, it holds a second event in the fall. Nvidia hasn’t announced a fall GTC yet, suggesting we might not see RTX 50-series GPUs this year.

The speculation up to this point has been that Nvidia would add a fall GTC event. Launching RTX 50-series GPUs this year would fit into Nvidia’s normal release cadence, and we’ve already seen Blackwell show up in the data center. Conflicting rumors have painted a slightly different picture, with some suggesting we’ll still see RTX 50-series GPUs this year and others pointing to early 2025.

The news from kopite7kimi is definitely the most credible information we have to go on so far. That doesn’t mean the release date has officially slipped, however. Nvidia is the market leader, so it sits in a position where it can slowly roll out a new generation of graphics cards. It typically does that anyway. So, it’s possible we could see the announcement of RTX 50-series GPUs this year, with the actual release coming in early 2025.

A lot of Nvidia’s decision internally likely comes down to what it expects from AMD and Intel. AMD is working on its RDNA 4 architecture for RX 8000 GPUs, which are currently expected to show up in 2025. Similarly, Intel’s Battlemage architecture is making its way into laptops with Lunar Lake later this year, but the desktop version of these GPUs aren’t expected to show up until 2025. Nvidia might be waiting it out to respond to its main competitors.

For now, all we can do is wait until Nvidia has more to share. Currently, the rumor mill suggests Nvidia will launch the RTX 5080 first, followed up by the RTX 5090 shortly after. Leakers also suggest that the RTX 5090 will come with a dual-slot design, which would be a welcome change of pace after the monstrous RTX 4090 we saw in the previous generation.