NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang has just been announced as delivering a keynote at CES 2025 which is widely expected to be the event where Team Green reveals its next-gen Blackwell GeForce GPUs.
So, what's the time and date you need to mark in your diary for finally finding out exactly how powerful the NVIDIA RTX 5090 is - and likely the RTX 5080 too? Scribble down Monday, January 6, at 6.30pm (PDT).
Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (which organizes CES) enthused: "We are thrilled to welcome Jensen Huang as a keynote speaker at CES 2025. Jensen is a true visionary in the tech industry. His insights and innovations improve the world, enhance the economy, and will inspire our CES audience."
No doubt we can expect to hear a bit about AI, too (even though this is a consumer show, of course). As VideoCardz (which noticed the CES press release) points out, typically CES would be used as a vehicle to unveil NVIDIA's laptop GPUs - and speaking of those, one rumor we've heard is that we could get a look at these mobile cards, too.
Yes, there could possibly be laptop graphics cards on show as well as the rumored desktop variants of the RTX 5090 and 5080 (hopefully).
We shall see, and remember, this will just be the initial announcing and showing off of these Blackwell GPUs. The graphics cards actually arriving on shelves will follow, likely soon thereafter.
Specs and pricing
There are two main points of interest at CES 2025 as regards NVIDIA's RTX 5000 line-up, then. Firstly - are the graphics cards going to be equipped as the rumor mill believes in terms of specs? That'll be the main thing, of course - and whether the RTX 5080 could end up a bit weak sauce relative to the flagship, which has been another rumor of late.
Of course, whatever the relative level of performance of the RTX 5080 ends up as compared to the RTX 5090 - the latter is expected to be very powerful - won't matter as such, because the real story will be told in the relative pricing. In other words, if NVIDIA pitches the RTX 5080 relatively affordably, then it could still be the best GPU of the Blackwell line-up in theory.
No, we don't believe that will happen either, but we won't know until we actually see what NVIDIA is planning, and we should definitely learn about pricing at CES 2025. We're expecting the worst, though, frankly - a truly exorbitant price on the RTX 5090, and probably a pretty eye-watering price tag on the RTX 5080 too.
In the meantime, AMD has RDNA 4 graphics cards also readying to launch, but probably not until slightly later in Q1 of 2025 - and these won't challenge NVIDIA's top-end GPUs anyway, rather, the mid-range offerings.