Nvidia is currently deliberating on the timing for releasing the RTX 5000 Blackwell lineup, with a potential Q4 2024 launch under consideration. The decision largely hinges on the performance of current-gen RTX 4000 series sales and AMD’s next GPUs, as the company may be keen to rectify the negative perception created by the RTX 4000 series.
Nvidia is mulling an earlier release of its next generation of consumer graphics cards, the RTX 5000 Blackwell line up, pushing it up to the fourth quarter of 2024, a source has told Moore’s Law is Dead. Two key deciding factors will be how well current-gen sales are doing, and how competitive AMD’s RDNA 4 (Radeon RX 8000 series) turn out to be. Outside competitive influences will also be a factor with the company closely watching how AMD’s next-gen RDNA 4 GPU architecture is shaping up. You can hear more of the source’s comments in the video below.
More speculative information has also been revealed on Blackwell’s expected performance. The improvement in performance won’t be as impressive as the jump we saw from RTX 3000 to RTX 4000, but the RTX 4090 was cut down by more than 10%, so Nvidia may make the RTX 5090 “feel” like it has a similar uplift if the company felt threatened.
The rumor mill has been churning over Blackwell’s specs for some time. Last month a leaker on the Chiphell forum, posted what it claimed to be stats for the RTX 5090: a 50% increase in scale (which presumably refers to cores), a 52% increase in memory bandwidth, 78% increase in L2 cache, 15% increase in frequency, and 1.7x performance uplift.
Another leak suggested that Nvidia would finally use a multi-chiplet design in the company’s high-performance compute GPUs.
What happens after CES 2024 and the release of the RTX 4000 Super series could also help finalize a release date for Blackwell. Moore’s Law is Dead’s source said that Nvidia is planning to make a big deal about RTX 5000 efficiency and Nvidia would be set to launch its next-gen by early 2025 at the latest.
Nvidia will feature a mildly refreshed RTX 4000 lineup at CES next month and if it is less-than-enthusiastically received, there is speculation that Nvidia might expedite the launch of the next generation to late 2024.