Nvidia is reportedly planning to launch its new Blackwell lineup of gaming GPUs with the GeForce RTX 5080 later this year, rather than starting with the RTX 5090, according to a prominent tech leaker. This completely contradicts earlier reports that the RTX 5090 would be the only Nvidia Blackwell gaming graphics card to launch this year, but it’s not unprecedented – Nvidia did, after all, launch the RTX 3080 before the RTX 3090 as well, and the RTX 2080 came out before the 2080 Ti too.
However, Nvidia changed its strategy when it launched the GeForce RTX 4090 back in 2022 and, despite its hefty price tag, this GPU has reigned supreme as the best graphics card ever since. Launching your most powerful GPU first certainly makes a statement, showing off the full capabilities of your new architecture, but the latest leak suggests that Nvidia is reverting to its previous strategy of bringing out its 80-series card first.
This latest leak comes from kopite7kimi, who rebutted a post on X (formerly Twitter) by TechPowerUp reporting on a rumor from Moore’s Law is Dead that only the RTX 5090 will be released in 2024. “It’s not ture [true],” replies kopite7kimi, “RTX 5080 should be released first.”
Of course, none of this has been confirmed by Nvidia, and we only have one leaker’s word against another, but kopite7kimi has good form in this area. Back in December 2022, for example, kopite7kimi nailed all the tech details of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, nearly four months before its eventual launch date in April 2023.
Meanwhile, the reliability of some of Moore’s Law is Dead’s sources have been called into question after the YouTube channel published a presentation slide detailing AMD’s Zen 5 CPU architecture, which later turned out to be a fake planted by SquashBionic.
Either way, take all of this with a pinch of salt at the moment, as we won’t know for sure when the RTX 5080 or 5090 will come out until Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gives us the big reveal (probably from his kitchen). Little is known about the specs yet, but it’s expected that the RTX 5080 will be quicker at ray tracing than the RTX 4090, and that it will also use GDDR7 memory.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a powerful 4K gaming graphics card, but can’t run to the cost of the RTX 4090, check out our RTX 4080 Super review, where we put Nvidia’s latest high-end GPU through its paces.