After months of back and forth between Q4 2024 and a possible 2025 release of NVIDIA’s next-generation GeForce RTX 50 series with Blackwell processors, it looks like the latter will be the case. Industry insider and leaker @kopite7kimi has stated on X that he believes we won’t see the GeForce RTX 50 series and the new flagship RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 combo until CES 2025.
Following reports that AMD would wait until CES 2025 to announce its plans for the next-generation Radeon RX 8000 series with RDNA 4, the news that NVIDIA may also be eyeing a January 2025 unveiling in Las Vegas would make for quite a GPU showdown in the desert.
However, AMD’s new flagship will be a mid-range update compared to NVIDIA’s next-gen RTX 4090 killer. For those of us looking forward to buying a GeForce RTX 5090 this holiday season, this delay is disappointing.
However, it’s worth remembering that the GeForce RTX 4090 is still extremely powerful and has been unchallenged at the top of PC gaming hardware for nearly two years. If that’s true, we probably won’t see any next-gen desktop graphics cards this year, as Intel’s next-gen Battlemage for desktop is also rumored to be coming sometime in 2025.
As for the reasoning, NVIDIA is now targeting 2025 for Blackwell gaming GPUs, which is still unknown. Speculation is wild, with some citing delays in GDDR7 memory production and others claiming this has allowed NVIDIA and its partners to sell more GeForce RTX 40-series inventory at decent margins. And then there’s the AI argument, where some suggest NVIDIA is in no rush to bring Blackwell to the desktop gaming market when it’s essentially running unrivaled and making a fortune off AI chips.
We will have more on this story as it develops. Interestingly, the timing of CES 2025 coincides with the recent rumor that NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5090D for the Chinese market was on track for a launch in January 2025.
