I Was The FIRST To Game On The RTX 5090 - NVIDIA 50 Series Announcement

The highlight of the NVIDIA keynote for me was when CEO Jensen Huang quipped that, if you bought an RTX 4090, that was probably the best investment you could make. I mean, just consider all the entertainment happiness that it could give you. But one small thing, Mr Huang, when NVIDIA launched the RTX 4090, your stock price was about 11.

50. So if someone had bought that instead of a 4090 as their "investment", well, hey, good news, because they should be able to comfortably afford a 5090 or 10. As for everybody else, well, unfortunately, NVIDIA doesn't take happiness.

So you're going to be trading a truly princely sum for the privilege of experiencing their latest and greatest. But affordability aside, this was a heck of an event. NVIDIA kicked it off with the most beautiful real-time rendered demo that I had ever seen, and then followed it up with a slew of new RTX Blackwell 50 series GPUs with brand new technologies like DLSS 4.

0, DLSS Transformer, neural faces, and some of the GPUs even have prices that, taken at face value, might actually be. . .

Kind of exciting? Jensen claimed on stage that the 5070 will offer 4090 levels of performance at $549. Then immediately followed that up with a huge red flag saying that this feat would be impossible without AI.

So I was all like, sick, woo! And then I was all like, I'll believe it when I see it. Well, no sooner did I say that than some burly guys in green showed up and said, all right, you cynical tech tipping son of a bitch, we're going to show it to you right now, but you got to do the thing.

The thing, I said? Yeah, the thing. Oh right, the thing, the segue to our sponsor.

Wicked Cushions. Give your headset a new lease on life with Wicked Cushions replacement ear pads. They offer impeccable comfort and more than a dozen awesome looks.

Get your own Wicked Cushions using our link in the video description today. We'll get to some of the AI and data center stuff from the keynote, but first, I want to talk GeForce. And right now, we are behind the scenes getting the first ever hands-on with the RTX 5090.

Well, we aren't yet. Now we are. They didn't tell me I could touch it, but they can't stop me.

They're way over there. Before we go deeper, there are a couple of things that stood out immediately from their sizzle video for this thing. I mean, yeah, there's the incredibly compact PCB with the state-of-the-art power delivery that enables a sick dual-fan, dual-slot cooler with pass-through for both of the fans.

That's right. Both of these fans are blowing right through the cart, but this, wow, thank you. No more need for fire prone right angle adapters to clean up your cable management and angled power connector.

Okay, okay Linus, it has a nice cable, but what about the specs? Oh, I've got specs. Let me put it this way.

If you have a 4090 right now, the 5090 is the GPU that she tells you not to worry about. In raw numbers, here's what that looks like. This is going to be one heck of an upgrade.

I can't wait to see it in action. So why am I waiting? Let's do it.

Here, relegated to the floor like a common chicken, is the previous king, the RTX 4090. Why don't we start there? Nvidia can't let me show you guys much prior to the performance embargo in a couple of weeks.

We get one game, and only one game, and we can't change the settings, but I can't think of anything I'd want to change here. Absolutely everything is cranked. And, to their credit, they did load up frame view, so I won't be purely relying on feel to evaluate the difference.

Let's play on the 4090. Yep, that's a pretty powerful GPU still. And it's even more powerful than you probably realize.

Before we move over to the 5090, this build of Cyberpunk has some new goodness baked into it, including Nvidia's new transformer model and DLSS4 frame gen. So the results we're getting, even on the 4090 here, are not going to be comparable to your system at home. This guy is performing a little better thanks to some of these changes.

It's nice that it's getting the extra help because this is not close even without looking at the numbers which are double this is wickedly smooth I still remember, I think it was on a ShortCircuit or something, we were looking at a system from, I want to say Maingear. It was my first time playing Cyberpunk on the 4090 because I hosted the review and everything but I never actually got to game on it and I was like oh my God. Yeah this is a lot faster, and it's like where are the polygons you know?

Where have my polys gone? Sure the thing is priced at 2000 US dollars a 25% increase and is rated at 575 watts but for the first time in what feels like forever at least we're getting more for the money this feels like a truly halo tier product the 512-bit memory bus, 5000 more CUDA cores and noticeably better performance like I can't believe that this is Cyberpunk running at 4K with Ray Tracing. I can't believe it, because it isn't.

Frame gen and AI assisted Ray Tracing are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Jensen gave us a bit of insight into this telling us that out of the about 33 million pixels in his demo only 2 million of them were calculated with the rest extrapolated using AI but okay I mean it doesn't matter as long as it looks good right so how good does it look? While I'm supposed to be just showing this off what I've actually been doing is looking around for a couple of interesting examples of how DLSS 4, doesn't handle everything perfectly.

See the way this text kind of jitters and blurs if I move around? It's not as clear as the rest of the frame? See it's okay if I do- It's okay if I strafe and I've noticed some instances of particularly bright or high contrast objects having little ghosts on them.

With that said, I know what I'm looking for, other reviewers are going to know what they're looking for, if I were to put one of my siblings in front of this Looks pretty good. And NVIDIA was quick to point out that this is both running at lower latency and with fewer artifacts than DLSS 3. 5.

Enough about the 5090 that let's face it most people aren't going to buy let's talk about the rest of the family. The RTX 5070 comparison to the 4090 should be taken with a grain of salt. I mean obviously that's going to be with DLSS version 4, obviously that's going to be using their new MFG or multi-frame generation at 4x.

That feature is limited to 50 series cards and is powered by AI and obviously the situation might change depending on the resolution you're running I mean 4K needs a fair bit of VRAM so can a few hundred more CUDA cores net such a wild performance boost? Especially with so much less VRAM, it's a bold claim. But with this mix of next gen CUDA tensor and RT cores along with GDDR7 it could very well achieve it at least in some titles.

And if it looks anywhere near as good as this does while costing less than half of what the 4090 did at launch? Well I certainly wish that it had 16 gigs of RAM but even without it they are going to sell a lot of these. Not to me you might say, I want 16 gigs of VRAM, well then you are going to need to take another step up to the 5070 ti or another another step to the RTX 5080.

And about these, if prices had stayed the same I'd probably be pretty pissed off right now but the two 70 class cards they showed today are 50 less than last gen and I don't know if that's because of competition but hey progress. And it actually gets better, the RTX 5080 with all the other bells and whistles that we've mentioned so far and supporting an additional thousand CUDA cores compared to its predecessor is set at just $999. I say just, I know a thousand dollars is still really expensive but that is down two hundred dollars from the RTX 4080 or about 16 percent.

It's got next gen everything, a thousand more CUDA cores, more than double the AI tops, and more memory bandwidth meaning it should deliver legitimately flagship class performance at that price even if there does exist an even higher end card for the mega ballers out there. Right alongside their new desktop GPUs, NVIDIA announced 50 series for laptops as well. They start as low as $1299 with the RTX 5070 and they are claiming 4090 performance using half of the power and then the lineup goes all the way up to an RTX 5090 at $2899.

By the way if you want to see our quick first initial reactions to MSI's 50 series cards when we were under embargo and to watch us prank Colton, why don't you check out our behind the scenes video over at lmg. gg/floatplane. But wait there's more.

Jensen brought a wafer prop onto the stage to illustrate the incredible technology that's built into their NV72 AI racks, he described it as equal to 20 cars. Not 100 percent sure if he meant in terms of complexity with the 600,000 parts, or price. Either way, each one draws 120,000 watts contains 130 trillion transistors and has 1.

4 exaflops FP4. But do what with it? Well I'm not sure yet but it's exciting and he wasn't done.

Another big announcement is Cosmos A world foundation model that's designed and created to understand the physical world. There are three levels of models and they're all openly licensed and available on Github, nano, super and ultra. They're saying this is kind of a Chat GPT moment for robots to help them interact with the real world which is super cool and also kind of scary especially when they brought the army of robots onto the stage.

That was cool. Anyway the point is you should be able to give a robot a prompt and then just watch it do the thing in the virtual world so that it can train itself virtually. They did it in The Matrix.

But it's the humans bamboozling the robots. Dodged a bullet there. Anyway a big part of the reason for this is that when you're training something like a car you can just do it in the real world.

We're driving around with cameras all the time we've got lots of data, but when it comes to humanoid robots it's a lot more challenging because they aren't just running around doing stuff because if they were it'd be extremely dangerous. So the idea with cosmos is to take the wear and tear out of the equation which will hopefully mean that costs can go way down in robotics development on a physical level. Just exactly what this is going to mean in the long term for everyone including potentially a lot of warehouse workers that aren't going to need to move things around anymore?

Well, I guess we'll see but wait there's even more! NVIDIA has announced, you guessed it, a ton of partnerships around robotics and machine vision promising to take the training that's happening in Cosmos and apply that to the real world. That was coupled with their new Thor AV computer, a Blackwell based robotics processor that also has their Grace Arm CPU cores on it that can handle a ton of visual data at once like cameras radar and lidar.

They're boasting 20 times the processing power of their previous generation which is absolutely wild and last but not least they included a couple allusions to the multi-trillion dollar industries that they're going to be addressing with all of this technology. So will NVIDIA's stock price soar even higher thanks to our new robot overlords? Again, I'm not sure because as NVIDIA carefully noted all of these are forward-looking statements and uh can't be taken as pure fact.

Finally last but not least, they surprised everyone including Nintendo by announcing the Switch 2. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I know that didn't happen. Anyway that's it.

The nearly two hour keynote ended and I had just enough time after trying the RTX 5090 to give you this segue to our sponsor. Wicked Cushions. Are your headphones looking a little old and busted?

Bring back that new headphone hotness with Wicked Cushions replacement ear pads. It takes just five minutes to get your headphones looking like they just came out of the box, but maybe that's not your style, maybe you're more of a Speed Racer cyan kind of guy or an orange prism gal? Well Wicked Cushions has you covered.

With more than a dozen great looks to choose from to make your headset stand out from the rest. Check out the link in the video description box to find the Wicked Cushions that are right for you. If you guys enjoyed this video, thank you for watching, check out the rest of our CES coverage maybe the AMD announcement?

Oh, gotta go.