Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 Series: All Of The Rumors So Far

For years, AMD and Nvidia have traded blows as the sole manufacturers of consumer-grade graphics cards. Although Intel’s Arc series added Team Blue to the GPU race, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 series continues to dominate our best GPU lists, and for good reason. Not only do the Ada Lovelace GPUs bring amazing ray-tracing capabilities to the table, but you also get to enjoy smoother frame rates thanks to a combination of DLSS 3.5 and frame generation.

What’s more, Team Green’s upcoming RTX 5000 series will be even better than the current generation. Named “Blackwell” after the Mathematician David Blackwell, the new graphics cards from Nvidia could bring high-bandwidth GDDR7 memory, support for PCIe 5.0, and several other features to the table. In this article, we’ll recap all the rumors and leaks about the GeForce RTX 5000 family.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 series: When we’re hoping to see it how much we want to pay

Nvidia tends to follow a 2-year release cycle for consumer graphics cards, with a refresh of the present-gen hardware around the one-year mark. Since Team Green debuted the Super variants of its current RTX 4000 GPUs in January 2024, we believe the Blackwell series will be unveiled between late 2024 and early 2025.

Earlier, HardwareLUXX, a German tech website, reported that we won’t see the “Ada Lovelace-Next” graphics cards before 2025. On the other hand, Youtuber Moore’s Law Is Deadclaimed that the newer cards could drop as early as Q4 2024. According to the leaker who tipped them off, the new series’ release window hinges on the RTX 4000 lineup sales and competition from AMD’s upcoming RDNA 4 series GPUs. In a recent X (previously called Twitter) thread, leaker kopite7kimi speculated that the new GPUs may be released “at the end of the year.”

Meanwhile, the pricing for the new graphics cards is anybody’s guess. The RTX series is notorious for being overpriced, and the exorbitant pricing trends are expected to continue with the Blackwell family. Assuming we’ll have an RTX 5090 instead of a 5090 Ti as the flagship GPU, it should bear the same (or slightly higher) launch price of $1,599 as the current-gen GeForce RTX 4090.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 series: What we could see

Potential MCM design

Unlike AMD, Nvidia has stuck to monolithic dies for its graphics cards. A monolithic chip has all the circuitry on the same die, which makes it difficult to shrink the transistors without increasing the overall chip size. In contrast, a Multi-Chip Module (MCM) approach involves adding separate chips (called chiplets) connected via interposers onto a single substrate. This increases the scalability of MCM-based chips and allows manufacturers to squeeze in better specs.

According to leaker kopite7kimiNvidia’s GB100 and GB102 data center chips will feature an MCM design instead of the traditional monolithic architecture. Likewise, the high-end GB202 chip is expected to bring the MCM architecture to consumer GPUs. However, this new design probably won’t be included in the GB203, GB205, GB206, and GB207 chips as Nvidia will go with the same old monolithic architecture for its budget and mid-range GPUs.

Higher bandwidth GDDR7 memory

Many GPU enthusiasts were disappointed with the Ada Lovelace family because Nvidia decided to bring over the GDDR6X and GDDR6 memory from older GPUs. Luckily, the rumor mill claims that the flagship graphics card(s) from the RTX 5000 series will leverage the latest GDDR7 memory. For reference, the GeForce RTX 4090 had a memory bandwidth of 1,008 GB/s, which is the same as that of the last-gen GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. In contrast, the memory bandwidth of the RTX 5090 is rumored to be 1,536 GB/s, which is a staggering 52% upgrade!

There have also been plenty of rumors about the GeForce 5090’s memory bus. Earlier, kopite7kimi had stated that the flagship Blackwell graphics card would feature a 512-bit memory interface. However, the leaker soon changed course, noting that the GeForce RTX 5090 would have the same 384-bit bus as the RTX 4090 and RTX 3090 Ti. In March 2024, he went back on his previous statement and claimed that the crème-de-la-crème GPU of the Blackwell family would feature a 512-bit memory bus.

Furthermore, the leaker said GB203 and GB205 won’t have the same memory interface as the flagship model, and will instead cap at 256-bit and 128-bit buses respectively. Aside from a few rumors claiming the RTX 5090 will have 36GB of GDDR7 memory, there haven’t been too many updates on the VRAM size of the GPU. Nevertheless, the GPU is bound to have at least 24GB of VRAM, like the last-gen RTX 4090. As for the other high-end model, kopite7kimi earlier cited that the GB203 card may possess half as much memory as the GB202 variant. Assuming it’s not a “multi-chip package,” this means a theoretical RTX 5080 will feature anywhere between 12 to 18GB of memory.

New TSMC 4N manufacturing process (with a higher core count)

Nvidia has continued to utilize newer manufacturing processes over the last couple of GPU generations, and judging by the rumors, the Blackwell series will be no different. Team Green’s upcoming GPU family will be based on the TSMC 4N process node, based on the TSMC 5 manufacturing process. Recently, kopite7kimi also confimred that the flagship GB202 chip will have the same manufacturing process as GB100, the chip meant for data center GPUs. However, the leaker noted that there would be a 30% increase in chip density of the GB202 SKU.

In an older tweet, kopite7kimi revealed that there won’t be a significant increase in the number of Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs) and Texture Processor Clusters (TPCs) on the new GPUs. Additionally, panzerlied claimed that besides a 15% increase in frequency and 78% more cache, the GeForce RTX 5090 could see a 50% improvement in scale, which could translate to a higher 24,576 CUDA core count.

Support for PCIe 5.0 and DisplayPort 2.1

Although the Ada Lovelace GPUs will work with PCIe 5.0 motherboards, they aren’t able to fully utilize the high-speed interface standard. However, the Blackwell GPUs are expected to be able to leverage the lightning-fast data transfer speeds provided by PCI Express Gen 5.0.

Likewise, the GeForce RTX 5000 graphics cards are rumored to be a step up from their predecessors in terms of display capabilities. According to kopite7kimithe new GPUs will be compatible with the DisplayPort 2.1 standard, which supports much higher bandwidth, refresh rate, and resolution than the last-gen DisplayPort 1.4.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 series rumors: To believe or not to believe

Although many of these leaks were disclosed by somewhat trustworthy sources, you should take them with a grain of salt. After all, there was quite an uproar from the community when the flagship RTX 4090 from the Ada Lovelace family was believed to have a max TDP of 800W. However, the rumors were put to rest when the RTX 4090 debuted with a 450W TDP.

While there are plenty of reasons to believe that Nvidia will debut the Blackwell family later this year, the company has kept its lips sealed for now. Either way, we’re bound to hear more about the upcoming GPU family before long. But if you’re unable to wait for the Blackwell series, the RTX 40-series GPUs still worth looking into. In particular, the GeForce RTX 4070 remains our favorite GPU that provides solid performance without costing a fortune.

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