Nvidia partners leak next-gen RTX 50-series GPUs, including a 32GB 5090

Rumors have suggested that Nvidia will be taking the wraps off of some next-generation RTX 50-series graphics cards at CES in January. And as we get closer to that date, Nvidia's partners and some of the PC makers have begun to inadvertently leak details of the cards. According to recent leaks from both Zotac and Acer, it looks like Nvidia is planning to announce four new GPUs next month, all at the high end of its lineup: The RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 were all briefly listed on Zotac's website, as spotted by VideoCardz. There's also an RTX 5090D variant for the Chinese market, which will presumably have its specs tweaked to conform with current US export restrictions on high-performance GPUs. Though the website leak didn't confirm many specs, it did list the RTX 5090 as including 32GB of GDDR7, an upgrade from the 4090's 24GB of GDDR6X. An Acer spec sheet for new Predator Orion desktops also lists 32GB of GDDR7 for the 4090, as well as 16GB of GDDR7 for the RTX 5080. This is the same amount of RAM included with the RTX 4080 and 4080 Super. The 5090 will be a big deal when it launches because no graphics card released since October 2022 has come close to beating the 4090’s performance. Nvidia’s early 2024 Super refresh for some 40-series cards didn’t include a 4090 Super, and AMD’s flagship RX 7900 XTX card is more comfortable competing with the likes of the 4080 and 4080 Super. The 5090 isn't a card that most people are going to buy, but for the performance-obsessed, it's the first high-end performance upgrade the GPU market has seen in more than two years. But we'd also expect the 5090 to be more expensive than the $1,599 MSRP of the RTX 4090. The 5090's GB202 GPU die is said to be physically larger than the AD102 GPU die used in the 4090, despite using a more advanced TSMC manufacturing process. Nvidia and its partners have also had problems keeping the RTX 4090 available at or anywhere close to its $1,599 MSRP in the first place. And while AMD and Intel do a good job of competing with Nvidia's other product tiers, neither company has released anything that can compete with the 4090's performance, to say nothing of the 5090. A price hike would also be consistent with statements from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has said that chips getting less expensive over time is "a story of the past" (though obviously, as someone with a vested interest in keeping prices high, Huang may not be an impartial source of information on this topic). The new leaks didn't confirm much one way or the other about the 5070 Ti or 5070, though other leaks have suggested that the cards will include 16GB and 12GB of GDDR7 memory, respectively. This is in line with the memory capacities of the current 4070 Ti Super and 4070 Super. Missing from the leak were any planned 5060-series cards for midrange gaming PCs. Nvidia usually starts at the top of its stack and works downward, so that's not too surprising. Hopefully we'll see some kind of midrange refresh from Nvidia later in the spring or summer of 2025.