Highlights

  • Nvidia plans to launch the RTX 5080 before the RTX 5090, according to industry leaker kopite7kimi.
  • Rumors swirl about a 2025 release of the next-gen Blackwell microarchitecture for the RTX 50 lineup.
  • Nvidia planning to shift focus to AI technology with Blackwell, named after American mathematician David Blackwell.

Nvidia will launch the RTX 5080 before releasing its next-generation flagship GPU, the RTX 5090, a known hardware industry leaker claimed as they addressed rumors regarding the unannounced cards. The tech giant unveiled its upcoming graphics microarchitecture earlier this year.

In a past roadmap, Nvidia revealed that the successor of Ada Lovelace, the microarchitecture that powers the current-generation RTX 40 series of graphics cards, would come out in 2025. That new line, codenamed Blackwell, was officially announced during a keynote at the company's GPU Technology Conference last March, but not a lot of details were provided. Since then, several rumors regarding the RTX 50 lineup of consumer graphics cards have circulated online.

nvidia logo black background
Related
Nvidia Revealing Next-Gen AI GPUs

World-renowned tech company Nvidia is showing off its latest crop of new, powerful GPUs, which feature some impressive AI technology.

A recent rumor suggested that Nvidia will release the RTX 5080 first before launching Blackwell's flagship GPU, the RTX 5090. This comes from known hardware industry leaker kopite7kimi, who disclosed the information in response to claims that only the more powerful card would launch in 2024, while the other offerings from the series would become available in the following year. The Twitter user correctly predicted the VRAM configuration of the RTX 4090, which is currently the fastest card on the market and one of Nvidia's best graphics cards.

It should be noted that kopite7kimi's statements have not always been completely on the mark. The leaker previously claimed that the RTX 40 series would arrive in the third quarter of 2022, or between July and September, but the first card in that generation, the top-of-the-line RTX 4090, ended up being launched a little bit later in October of that year. Kopite7kimi also incorrectly predicted the specs of the RTX 3050 Ti, saying that the GPU would have 3584 CUDA cores instead of the 2,560 it actually shipped with.

Nvidia RTX 5090 Rumored Release Date

  • 2024

Nvidia touted Blackwell's strength when it comes to AI-related workloads in its most recent GTC event. The semiconductor giant has focused its efforts on the much-hyped technology, with CEO Jensen Huang even proclaiming that Nvidia was no longer a graphics company. This shift has faced issues, and Nvidia was even slapped with a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit in connection to its NeMo framework.

The namesake of Nvidia's next-generation graphics microarchitecture is American mathematician David Blackwell, a great contributor to several fields of studies, including game theory and statistics, among others. Meanwhile, its predecessor, Ada Lovelace, which features some of the best gaming GPUs in 2024 like the Super versions of RTX 4070 and RTX 4080, was named after the Countess of Lovelace, Augusta Ada King, the English mathematician recognized for being the first computer programmer.