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 possibly can use to explain Nvidia’s method to gaming GPUs during the last 25 years, it’s “relentless,” however in 2025 you possibly can 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 a minimum of made on account of large architectural adjustments to GPUs, slightly than complacency. However Nvidia’s newest gaming GPUs seem like the results of an organization that thinks it might probably coast alongside with out shaking up its system.
After all, I perceive why gaming isn’t a high precedence for Nvidia proper now. Jensen Huang is the businessman of the second in his fancy leather-based jackets, the corporate is actually value trillions, and the AI revolution is mainly an industrial-scale cash printer for Nvidia’s shareholders. The upshot of this laser deal with AI, although, is that Nvidia has taken its foot off the fuel within the gaming world, not simply when it comes to the core tech for the RTX 5000 GPUs, but additionally when it comes to 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 relation to RTX 5090 inventory. My chats behind the scenes with (massive) retailers inform a narrative of tiny deliveries of the brand new GPUs, usually 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, after all, 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 rapidly.
In the meantime, RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti playing cards are turning up with a few of their ROPs not working, leading to important impacts on body charges in some video games, prompting Nvidia to request clients to ship again defective graphics playing cards for substitute. Then there are the horror tales of extraordinarily excessive currents being pumped by way of the only 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 greatest disappointment for me with this launch is that complacency – other than the availability points, the brand new GPUs aren’t horrible, they’re simply tedious and unexciting. Nvidia has frequently put the competitors to disgrace with its relentless march ahead, similar to introducing {hardware} rework 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 rapidly, and was thus far forward, that usually the competitors simply didn’t have an opportunity to battle again.
Examine that to now, when the one large promoting level of the brand new RTX 5000 sequence is multi body gen, utilizing AI to insert a number of frames between those genuinely rendered by the GPU to enhance the body charge. It really works effectively in case your beginning body charge is excessive sufficient, and I noticed superb leads to my RTX 5090 overview, however I discovered this tech made a lot much less sense in my RTX 5070 overview. What’s extra, only some 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 quicker than their predecessors in relation to 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 technology of GPUs, while you normally anticipate 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 similar to path tracing to be applied into video games, nevertheless it’s outfitted its new GPUs with so little reminiscence that they’ll’t truly 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 overview, 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 acquired used to the concept 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 combating, and now Nvidia has an actual battle on its fingers. AMD has caught up with ray tracing now, and it has respectable AI upscaling tech with FSR 4 as effectively. As I discovered in my AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT overview, 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 could be answered by pointing to Nvidia’s web value proper now. Nvidia didn’t want the RTX 5000 launch to go easily, it might have launched a spread of Nvidia-branded refried beans as an alternative of gaming GPUs for this technology, and it might nonetheless be value trillions. I’d prefer to advise sticking it to the person and voting along with your pockets, however that’s hardly potential 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 big. Nvidia guess the home on AI being sufficient to hold its in any other case underpowered GeForce RTX 5000 GPUs by way of this technology, with Jensen Huang even making the ludicrous declare that the RTX 5070 affords 4090 efficiency, a feat that it might probably 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 might probably’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, nevertheless it’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 with no 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 loads of hassle.
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