Back in February, we published: SPECULATIVE: Nvidia 50-series Could Be Ready by Q4-2024, Early 2025 and continue to see articles pushing tech specs on the new 50-series graphic cards. One of my quotes at the end of this article was this prognostication:
I could be wrong, but my guess is the 50-series aren’t going to add a significant performance boost over the 4090. Instead, they will focus on energy and costs involved in running them … which brings down the yearly cost of running a PC with these beastly specs.
Lately, I’m reading several articles going into more depth on the 5090 Founder’s Edition like this:
While the current NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 & RTX 4080 Founders Edition GPUs adopted a triple-slot and dual-axial tech fan design, the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition is expected to slim things out a bit with a dual-slot cooling solution with a dual-fan cooler. Now it is unknown if the card would use the same dual-axial and flow-through design as the RTX 4090 Founders Edition or go with a front-facing design.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition GPU Gets Dual-Slot & Dual-Fan Cooling Solution (wccftech.com)
If true, it will further reinforce my own thoughts of what these 50-series cards will focus on primarily: less energy consumption, smaller footprint. These improvements aren’t as significant to gaming specifically, as they are to not melting down the cards like some of the 4090s have done. Too much heat, improper connections are a safety hazard. Why should any modern gaming computer need over 1,000 watts anyway? Computers should be increasingly energy and space efficient.
Articles like these, also very speculative at this point (we must keep that in mind), do make me wonder about the 60-series being that actual dramatic improvement in gaming. Perhaps 8K will be more focused by then (or maybe the 70-series will focus on 8K), thus the 50-series cards will focus on making 4K more efficient and less about any major graphical improvements and/or support.
I also think the gaming obsession with higher FPS (Frames Per Second) will be more pronounced in the 50-series cards. Maybe 4K 500hz or greater being more prevalent.
In a perfect world, prices come down. The 5090 should not debut at over $2,000. Yes, this might be a pipe dream, but wider adoption will happen if the top end cards are in the $1,000 range than $2,000+.
What features would you like to see in 50-series GPUs?