Want an RTX 5090? Prepare to wait a little longer

By Monica J. White Published September 27, 2024

Nvidia’s upcoming top GPU is taking its sweet time to make it to the market, and by the sound of it, we won’t see it anytime soon. According to a new report from Benchlife, as well as various other sources, Nvidia is planning to unveil the RTX 50-series at CES 2025 in January. This means that the RTX 5090 is unlikely to make an appearance any sooner than three to four months from now. On the upside, we just learned even more about what the card’s going to offer.

After a few months of managing expectations, many GPU enthusiasts no longer expect the RTX 50-series to be released this year — and leakers agree. Following the huge specification leak we got yesterday, at least two new publications (both Benchlife and The Verge) are now claiming that Nvidia won’t announce its next-gen GPUs until 2025. Reputable hardware leakers like kopite7kimi have also previously said that early 2025 is the current target.

If you asked me at the beginning of 2024, I’d have expected to see the RTX 5090 hitting the shelves around October. And it’s not just Nvidia. The general expectation was that we’d see all three GPU manufacturers — AMD, Nvidia, and Intel — launch their new graphics cards in 2024. However, for months now, we’ve been getting signs that this might turn out to be a disappointing year for PC hardware. The year might come to an end with next to no GPU releases outside of the RTX 40-series refresh and AMD’s RX 7600 XT. There was also the RX 7900 GRE, but that’s a 2023 GPU that only got a worldwide release earlier this year.

The release date reports are disappointing, but not at all surprising. The good news is that the spec leak from yesterday opened the floodgates on what else we can expect from the RTX 5090. For starters, Nvidia is said to be switching to the PCIe 5.0 interface, which means that you’ll need a recent processor and a solid motherboard with PCIe Gen 5 support to make the most of the GPU.

We’re also going to see an upgrade to a DisplayPort 2.1a connection with full support for UHBR20, which stands for ultra-high bit rate and delivers much higher bandwidth than its predecessor. The card is also said to come with a 14-layer printed circuit board (PCB). Yesterday, we learned that the RTX 5090 will sport 21,760 CUDA cores, a 512-bit memory bus, and 32GB of GDDR7 memory. Remember that all of this is unconfirmed, so don’t take any of that information for granted.

Not getting the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080 released this year means that Nvidia may miss out on an important opportunity. The final quarter of the year is typically the best one for PC sales, and we’ve gotten used to seeing new Nvidia GPUs around that time during the RTX generations. However, with rumors saying that Nvidia is only now getting close to finalizing the specs for its flagship card, it feels like all hope of a 2024 launch is gone at this point — but we won’t know anything for certain until Nvidia itself makes an announcement.