The highlight of the NVIDIA keynote for me was when CEO Jensen Huang quipped that, if you bought an RTX 4090, that was probably the best investment you could make. I mean, just consider all the entertainment happiness that it could give you. But one small thing, Mr. Huang, when NVIDIA launched the RTX 4090, your stock price was about 11.50. So if someone had bought that instead of a 4090 as their “investment”, well, hey, good news, because they should be able to comfortably afford a 5090 or 10. As for everybody else, well, unfortunately, NVIDIA doesn’t take happiness. So you’re going to be trading a truly princely sum for the privilege of experiencing their latest and greatest. But affordability aside, this was a heck of an event.
Impressive Real-Time Rendering and New GPUs
NVIDIA kicked it off with the most beautiful real-time rendered demo that I had ever seen, and then followed it up with a slew of new RTX Blackwell 50 series GPUs with brand new technologies like DLSS 4.0, DLSS Transformer, neural faces, and some of the GPUs even have prices that, taken at face value, might actually be… Kind of exciting? On stage, Jensen asserted that the 5070 will cost $549 and have performance comparable to 4090. Then immediately followed that up with a huge red flag saying that this feat would be impossible without AI. So I was all like, sick, woo! And then I was all like, I’ll believe it when I see it.
The RTX 5090 Sneak Peek
Well, no sooner did I say that than some burly guys in green showed up and said, all right, you cynical tech tipping son of a bitch, we’re going to show it to you right now, but you got to do the thing. The thing, I said? Yeah, the thing. Oh right, the thing, the segue to our sponsor. Wicked Cushions. We’ll get to some of the AI and data center stuff from the keynote, but first, I want to talk GeForce. And right now, we are behind the scenes getting the first ever hands-on with the RTX 5090. Well, we aren’t yet. Now we are. They didn’t tell me I could touch it, but they can’t stop me. They’re way over there.
Compact PCB and Impressive Specs
Before we go deeper, there are a couple of things that stood out immediately from their sizzle video for this thing. I mean, yeah, there’s the incredibly compact PCB with the state-of-the-art power delivery that enables a sick dual-fan, dual-slot cooler with pass-through for both of the fans. That’s right. Both of these fans are blowing right through the cart, but this, wow, thank you. No more need for fire-prone right angle adapters to clean up your cable management and angled power connector. Okay, okay Linus, it has a nice cable, but what about the specs?
RTX 5090 Performance
Oh, I’ve got specs. Let me put it this way. If you have a 4090 right now, the 5090 is the GPU that she tells you not to worry about. In raw numbers, here’s what that looks like. Oh, what a bang of an upgrade! I’m really excited to watch it happen. So why am I waiting? Let’s do it. Here, relegated to the floor like a common chicken, is the previous king, the RTX 4090. Why don’t we start there?
Cyberpunk Testing and GPU Performance
Nvidia can’t let me show you guys much prior to the performance embargo in a couple of weeks. We get one game, and only one game, and we can’t change the settings, but I can’t think of anything I’d want to change here. Absolutely everything is cranked. And, to their credit, they did load up frame view, so I won’t be purely relying on feel to evaluate the difference. Let’s play on the 4090. Yep, that’s a pretty powerful GPU still. And it’s even more powerful than you probably realize.
DLSS 4.0 and Frame Generation Insights
Before we move over to the 5090, this build of Cyberpunk has some new goodness baked into it, including Nvidia’s new transformer model and DLSS4 frame gen. So the results we’re getting, even on the 4090 here, are not going to be comparable to your system at home. This guy is performing a little better thanks to some of these changes.
5090 Upgrade and AI-Assisted Graphics
Sure the thing is priced at 2000 US dollars, a 25% increase, and is rated at 575 watts, but for the first time in what feels like forever at least we’re getting more for the money. This feels like a truly halo-tier product, the 512-bit memory bus, 5000 more CUDA cores, and noticeably better performance. I can’t believe that this is Cyberpunk running at 4K with Ray Tracing. I can’t believe it, because it isn’t. Frame gen and AI-assisted Ray Tracing are doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Testing DLSS 4.0’s Limits
Jensen gave us a bit of insight into this, telling us that out of the about 33 million pixels in his demo, only 2 million of them were calculated with the rest extrapolated using AI. But okay, I mean it doesn’t matter as long as it looks good, right? So how good does it look? While I’m supposed to be just showing this off, what I’ve actually been doing is looking around for a couple of interesting examples of how DLSS 4 doesn’t handle everything perfectly.
Affordability and Performance of New GPUs
Enough about the 5090 that let’s face it, most people aren’t going to buy. And when it is the whole family, the comparison between RTX 5070 to 4090 can be taken with a pinch of salt.I mean, obviously that’s going to be with DLSS version 4, obviously that’s going to be using their new MFG or multi-frame generation at 4x.
RTX 5070 and 5080 Pricing
But with this mix of next-gen CUDA tensor and RT cores along with GDDR7, it could very well achieve it, at least in some titles. And if it looks anywhere near as good as this does while costing less than half of what the 4090 did at launch? Well, I certainly wish that it had 16 gigs of RAM but even without it, they are going to sell a lot of these. Not to me you might say, I want 16 gigs of VRAM, well then you are going to need to take another step up to the 5070 ti or another step to the RTX 5080.
Pricing and Value of 5080 Series
And about these, if prices had stayed the same, I’d probably be pretty pissed off right now, but the two 70 class cards they showed today are 50 less than last gen, and I don’t know if that’s because of competition, but hey, progress. And it actually gets better, the RTX 5080 with all the other bells and whistles that we’ve mentioned so far and supporting an additional thousand CUDA cores compared to its predecessor is set at just $999.
NVIDIA’s Laptop GPUs and Future Trends
Finally, right alongside their new desktop GPUs, NVIDIA announced 50 series for laptops as well. They start as low as $1299 with the RTX 5070, and they are claiming 4090 performance using half of the power, and then the lineup goes all the way up to an RTX 5090 at $2899.
AI, Robotics, and Future Innovations
Jensen brought a wafer prop onto the stage to illustrate the incredible technology that’s built into their NV72 AI racks, he described it as equal to 20 cars. Not 100 percent sure if he meant in terms of complexity with the 600,000 parts, or price. Either way, each one draws 120,000 watts, contains 130 trillion transistors, and has 1.4 exaflops FP4.
Cosmos and Robotics
Another big announcement is Cosmos, a world foundation model that’s designed and created to understand the physical world. There are three levels of models and they’re all openly licensed and available on Github: nano, super, and ultra. They’re saying this is kind of a ChatGPT moment for robots to help them interact with the real world which is super cool and also kind of scary especially when they brought the army of robots onto the stage. That was cool.
Robotics Partnerships and Innovation
Anyway, a big part of the reason for this is that when you’re training something like a car, you can just do it in the real world. We’re driving around with cameras all the time, we’ve got lots of data, but when it comes to humanoid robots, it’s a lot more challenging because they aren’t just running around doing stuff. So the idea with Cosmos is to take the wear and tear out of the equation, which will hopefully mean that costs can go way down in robotics development on a physical level.
Impact on Industries and the Future of AI
Just exactly what this is going to mean in the long term for everyone, including potentially a lot of warehouse workers that aren’t going to need to move things around anymore? Well, I guess we’ll see but wait, there’s even more! NVIDIA has announced, you guessed it, a ton of partnerships around robotics and machine vision promising to take the training that’s happening in Cosmos and apply that to the real world.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
That was coupled with their new Thor AV computer, a Blackwell-based robotics processor that also has their Grace Arm CPU cores on it that can handle a ton of visual data at once, like cameras, radar, and lidar. They’re boasting 20 times the processing power of their previous generation, which is absolutely wild. And last but not least, they included a couple allusions to the multi-trillion dollar industries that they’re going to be addressing with all of this technology. So will NVIDIA’s stock price soar even higher thanks to our new robot overlords? Again, I’m not sure because as NVIDIA carefully noted, all of these are forward-looking statements and uh can’t be taken as pure fact. Follow to get more updates on Tech Education.
