For the primary time in its historical past of creating gaming GPUs, Nvidia hasn’t simply dropped the ball, however embarrassingly fumbled it, watched it roll right into a drain, after which trodden on a rake for an encore. If there’s one phrase you might use to explain Nvidia’s strategy to gaming GPUs during the last 25 years, it’s “relentless,” however in 2025 you might substitute that with “complacent.”
Till this yr, Nvidia hardly ever rested on its laurels, and even when it made errors (I’m you, GeForce FX and Fermi) they have been at the least made on account of large architectural modifications to GPUs, somewhat than complacency. However Nvidia’s newest gaming GPUs appear like the results of an organization that thinks it may well coast alongside with out shaking up its components.
After all, I perceive why gaming isn’t a prime precedence for Nvidia proper now. Jensen Huang is the businessman of the second in his fancy leather-based jackets, the corporate is actually price trillions, and the AI revolution is mainly an industrial-scale cash printer for Nvidia’s shareholders. The upshot of this laser concentrate on AI, although, is that Nvidia has taken its foot off the gasoline within the gaming world, not simply by way of the core tech for the RTX 5000 GPUs, but additionally by way of high quality management, manufacturing, and provide.
Provide of all Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 GPUs is, for all intents and functions, a piece of fiction proper now, notably in the case of RTX 5090 inventory. My chats behind the scenes with (giant) retailers inform a narrative of tiny deliveries of the brand new GPUs, typically a number of weeks aside, with a few of them nonetheless not turning up till the precise day of the launch. Demand can be excessive, in fact, however provide is so removed from the place it needs to be that it’s laughable. Comparably, Radeon RX 9070 XT inventory is bigger by orders of magnitude, and remains to be promoting out extremely shortly.
In the meantime, RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti playing cards are turning up with a few of their ROPs not working, leading to vital impacts on body charges in some video games, prompting Nvidia to request prospects to ship again defective graphics playing cards for substitute. Then there are the horror tales of extraordinarily excessive currents being pumped by the one 16-pin energy connector on the RTX 5090, together with cables melting and energy provide sockets being burned out. Educated PC overclocker and YouTuber Roman “De8rauer” Hartung has even described the RTX 5090’s energy connection setup as “completely regarding,” after recognizing one of many wires hitting 150°C.
However the largest disappointment for me with this launch is that complacency – other than the provision points, the brand new GPUs aren’t horrible, they’re simply tedious and unexciting. Nvidia has repeatedly put the competitors to disgrace with its relentless march ahead, comparable to introducing {hardware} remodel and lighting with the GeForce 256, the primary programmable shaders with GeForce 3, in addition to ray tracing and DLSS with its RTX GPUs. Nvidia moved so shortly, and was up to now forward, that usually the competitors simply didn’t have an opportunity to combat again.
Examine that to now, when the one large promoting level of the brand new RTX 5000 collection is multi body gen, utilizing AI to insert a number of frames between those genuinely rendered by the GPU to enhance the body fee. It really works nicely in case your beginning body fee is excessive sufficient, and I noticed superb leads to my RTX 5090 evaluation, however I discovered this tech made a lot much less sense in my RTX 5070 evaluation. What’s extra, just a few video games help it, with DLSS Override within the Nvidia App nonetheless frustratingly unsupported by most video games.
In the meantime, a lot of the GPUs themselves are barely any sooner than their predecessors in the case of rendering energy, even in ray tracing, with the identical quantity of VRAM as their rapid predecessors. The one exception is the 32GB RTX 5090, and you must pay an additional $400 over the RTX 4090’s MSRP for that bump in efficiency – that’s one other disappointment after ready two years for the subsequent era of GPUs, whenever you normally count on to get extra efficiency for a similar value.
What I discover most baffling is that it’s Nvidia, not AMD or anybody else, that has been actually pushing for superior graphical options comparable to path tracing to be applied into video games, but it surely’s geared up its new GPUs with so little reminiscence that they’ll’t really do it. The RTX 5070 can’t even run Indiana Jones and the Nice Circle at 1080p maxed out, and as I discovered in my RTX 5080 evaluation, this $999 card can’t do it at 4K both. Multi body gen can’t assist in case your GPU doesn’t have sufficient VRAM to correctly render the frames within the first place.
As Intel discovered when it obtained used to the thought of churning out generations of near-identical quad-core chips over a number of years, for those who relaxation in your laurels, the competitors will come out preventing, and now Nvidia has an actual battle on its palms. AMD has caught up with ray tracing now, and it has first rate AI upscaling tech with FSR 4 as nicely. As I discovered in my AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT evaluation, this new GPU is a lot extra highly effective than the RTX 5070 that Nvidia needs to be ashamed.
Frustratingly, it nearly feels pointless to criticize Nvidia for the GeForce RTX 5000 launch, as something I say may be answered by pointing to Nvidia’s internet price proper now. Nvidia didn’t want the RTX 5000 launch to go easily, it may have launched a spread of Nvidia-branded refried beans as a substitute of gaming GPUs for this era, and it might nonetheless be price trillions. I’d wish to advise sticking it to the person and voting along with your pockets, however that’s hardly doable when there aren’t even any GPUs to purchase – it appears to be like as if Nvidia merely doesn’t care about PC gaming any extra.
The tech world is fickle, although, and the gaming market remains to be enormous. Nvidia guess the home on AI being sufficient to hold its in any other case underpowered GeForce RTX 5000 GPUs by this era, with Jensen Huang even making the ludicrous declare that the RTX 5070 affords 4090 efficiency, a feat that it may well pull off in comparatively undemanding video games that help multi body gen, however not a lot else. Nvidia has the advantage of there being no competitors on the excessive finish to assist it this time, in addition to the large market dominance of its model, however it may well’t depend on that without end.
Sure, there’s plenty of scope for AI in neural rendering, and sure multi body gen is a great tool within the field, but it surely’s not sufficient to make a PC gamer select an underpowered GPU over a extra highly effective one for a similar value. Nvidia has taken PC avid gamers without any consideration, and the competitors is now ferocious. If AMD carries on at this tempo with its next-gen GPUs, and Nvidia remains to be napping, then RTX 6000 could possibly be in quite a lot of hassle.
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