Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 Series cards – the RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070/5070 Ti – will be shipping to both us and consumers towards the end of the month. A new generation means updated specs, but if you’ve been reading headlines, you’ve likely heard of Nvidia’s bold claim that the RTX 5070 will have 4090 levels of performance. There’s a lot to be both excited and skeptical of – and we took the time to parse through the information to show you just how good the RTX 50 series actually is.
Comparing Specs to Prior Generations
Let’s start off with the numbers. How do the specs onboard the 50 series compare to its predecessors? As folks on reddit love to point out, Nvidia’s graphs can be a bit sneaky, but the pure stats don’t lie:
| RTX 5090 | RTX 5080 | RTX 5070 Ti | RTX 5070 | RTX 4090 | RTX 4080 | RTX 3090 | RTX 3080 Ti | |
| Architecture | Blackwell | Blackwell | Blackwell | Blackwell | Ada Lovelace | Ada Lovelace | Ampere | Ampere |
| CUDA cores | 21,760 | 10,752 | 8,960 | 6400 | 16,384 | 9728 | 10496 | 8704 |
| Ray Tracing Cores | 170 | 136 | 108 | 88 | 144 | 76 | 82 | 68 |
| Memory | 32 GB GDDR7 | 16 GB GDDR7 | 16 GB GDDR7 | 12 GB GDDR7 | 24 GB GDDR6x | 16GB GDDR6x | 24GB GDDR6X | 10GB GDDR6X |
| Memory Bandwidth | 1,792 GB/s | 960 GB/s | 896 GB/s | 672 GB/s | 1,008 GB/s | 912 GB/s | 936 GB/s | 760 GB/s |
| DLSS | 4th Gen | 4th Gen | 4th Gen | 4th Gen | 3rd Gen | 3rd Gen | 2nd Gen | 2nd Gen |
| Power | 600W | 400W | 285W | 250W | 450W | 320W | 350W | 320W |
Note: If you believe one of these stats is off, please comment! I cross-referenced a lot of tables!
Some of the gains from last generation are modest, like the total VRAM of the 5080 only changing in generation – while other gains are absurd, like the 5090 having a memory bandwidth closer to 2 TB/s than 1. 600W for the 5090 is no joke, either – that’s more wattage than everything my own build needs combined!
From card to card though, it’s not a simple curve. If you’re investing in the 50 series, you’ll need to decide which stat is your priority before investing, be it bandwidth, VRAM, or ray tracing.
Notable Features of the RTX 50 Series
I’m sure that everyone is a little bit tired of hearing everyone harp on AI features. That being said, team green is known the world around for its talents in artificial intelligence. The proof is in the pudding, too: we build all of our own AI systems with NVidia video cards. The new generation seeks to carry the torch. Here are a couple features onboard the RTX 50 series cards really worth writing home about:
DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation
This is the fabled feature that allows the RTX 5070 to share peak framerates with the RTX 4090. Using AI, the RTX 50 series cards can generate up to 3 frames in between two “true” frames. This means your framerates rocket upwards by a factor of about 4x. It’s compatible with a whole litany of games. However, this feature has been a big point of contention online, garnering the term “fake frames”. Granted, DLSS Frame generation has been around since the 20 series, but gamers are a bit put off by the fact that more of the frames in NVidia’s performance examples are generated than “real”.
Despite the backlash, the feature has been play tested by a few content creators thus far, and they seem to like it just fine. It’s a feature you can keep turned off if you like as well, though it could provide a seriously smooth experience especially in beautiful single player worlds. I’m personally curious about how it will affect more fast-paced gameplay via latency, though Nvidia’s Reflex 2 may be more interesting to that crowd.
Full Ray Tracing
RTX 50 series cards, using their 4th gen ray tracing cores, 5th gen tensor cores and a whole lot of engineering (in the form of “neural rendering”), will be emulating how light bounces around in 3D space really, really accurately. This one’s particularly exciting for older games getting a makeover – Valve’s titles are famously used as an example here. It’s great to see Nvidia pushing the realism envelope even further, especially when it comes to bringing new life to games modern and classic alike.
The GeForce RTX 50 series video cards accurately represent what a new generation of video cards typically looks like nowadays. The flagship RTX 5090 boasts both massive improvements and steady climbs over its predecessor. The other cards in the family are no different, and if DLSS 4 is all it’s chalked up to be, then this could be another bumper year for Nvidia.
If you’re excited to get your hands on an RTX 50 series card, you can contact us at [email protected] or at (804) 419-0900 – We’ll whip you up the perfect build for your needs as soon as the cards become available.
Marcus is the Designer at Velocity Micro. He’s behind nearly all of the images you’ll see from us. His interest in PCs is the product of his experience in digital art and design, 3D modeling, and computer peripherals. Lives with his partner, two dogs, two cats, a little woodshop and his arcade controller collection in the greater RVA area.
