After months of agonizing anticipation, Nvidia has finally announced the RTX 5080, along with the rest of the Blackwell lineup, including the RTX 5090, RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 at CES 2025. We'll finally be able to get our hands on the next-generation graphics card on January 30. Until then, Nvidia has revealed the full specs of the card so we can get a rough idea of what to expect when it makes its way into a gaming PC near you.

Nvidia RTX 5080 release date

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 launches January 30, 2025, along with its bigger sibling, the RTX 5090. Nvidia has also announced the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti, though those don't have a definite release date – though we can expect them by March.

As for the laptop version of the RTX 5080, Nvidia claims availability will 'start in March', though that is going to largely depend on the laptop manufacturers. it could be April before we see the likes of Alienware, MSI and Asus work the RTX 5080 into their next-generation laptops.

Nvidia RTX 5080 price

When Nvidia unveiled the RTX 5080, it revealed a starting price of $999 for the RTX 5080, with third party cards likely being much more expensive, depending on how fancy their coolers and features are.

While I don't know how likely it'll be to get an RTX 5080 for $999 when it hits the street, it is a significantly lower launch price than the RTX 4080, which launched for $1,199 back in 2022. That's surprising, when you consider the RTX 5090 saw a price jump from $1,599 to $1,99 – also a starting price.

As for the lower-tier cards, the RTX 5070 Ti will start at $749, with the RTX 5070 starting at $549.

Getting a gaming laptop with an RTX 5080 is going to be quite a bit more expensive, of course, as you're buying an entire system instead of a single component. During the keynote at CES, Nvidia claims systems will start at $2,199, with more premium systems likely getting a substantial price bump. With these gaming laptops, though, keep in mind that they'll be much less performant than the equivalent desktop GPU. My general rule of thumb, without seeing testing, is that the laptop GPU is the equivalent of two tiers down. So, for instance, the RTX 5090 mobile will likely perform at the level of the desktop RTX 5070, with the RTX 5080 likely matching a desktop RTX 5060 – even if that hasn't even been announced yet.

Nvidia RTX 5080 specs

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 is built on the Blackwell architecture that Nvidia's been using to power Supercomputers for the past year or so. While I'm not lucky enough to to test a data center GPU in Cyberpunk, Nvidia is making some lofty claims about the performance of this architecture, especially when it comes to AI performance, which is important for upscaling in modern PC games.

This graphics card sports 10,752 CUDA cores across 84 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). That's actually a raw increase over the RTX 4080, which only sported 9,728 shaders. Assuming each Blackwell-based CUDA core has a significant IPC improvement over their last-gen counterparts, this increase in cores could mean significantly better performance.

Of course, each SM has more than just CUDA cores. Nvidia hasn't released the chip layout, but assuming Blackwell has a similar layout to Ada Lovelace, each SM should have 4 Tensor Cores, which would make for a total of 336 Tensor Cores. Each SM also features a RT Core, which powers Ray Tracing. Nvidia is claiming a theoretical 1,801 TOPS of AI performance through the Tensor Cores and 171 Teraflops of ray tracing performance through the RT cores.

Finally, the RTX 5080 sports 16GB of GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus. Because the RTX 5000 series are the first graphics cards to ever use GDDR7, I have no idea what impact this will have on performance, but it should be much faster than the GDDR6X on the RTX 4080 – though only time will tell.

Nvidia RTX 5080 performance

When Jensen Huang took the stage at CES 2025 with his flashy new jacket, he made some lofty claims about RTX 5090 performance, and even claimed that the RTX 5070 would match the RTX 4090. he supported these claims with benchmarks using the new DLSS 4, which coincidentally won't run on RTX 4000 cards, so you should take them with a grain of salt.

The truth of the matter is that I have no idea how fast these graphics cards are, and I won't have a clear picture until I get them in the lab to actually test them in a controlled setting. Nvidia also made really lofty claims of gen-on-gen performance when it launched the RTX 4080, and that didn't turn out so well for Team Green. Luckily, with the RTX 5080 launching on January 30, we won't have to wait long to see what they have in store.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

When Lenovo announced the Legion Go S earlier today at CES, I thought it was just a lightweight version of the existing behemoth of a gaming handheld, and in many ways, the Windows 11 version is exactly that (it's also available for preorder at Best Buy). However, the Lenovo Legion Go S will also be available with SteamOS, which makes it $100 cheaper and so much easier to use. It gives us a glimpse of SteamOS's future and how it could become a serious threat to Windows – especially for handheld gaming PCs and gaming laptops.

Design

From the images I saw in the press release, I thought the Lenovo Legion Go S would be much smaller than the original Legion Go. I was wrong. The Lenovo Legion Go S feels about the same in my hands as the Asus ROG Ally X, which is currently the best handheld gaming PC on the market right now. Even though it sports a big screen, it still feels comfortable, especially without the knobs and dials of the original device.

Instead, the sides of the Lenovo Legion Go S are smooth and rounded, contouring nicely in the hand, and the hatched texture on the grips of the device will probably help prevent accidental drops. The rear side of those grips hides the only "extra" buttons on the device, two paddle-like buttons, one on either side of the device. That's a stark contrast from the Lenovo Legion Go, which had a ton of extra buttons and dials, as the removable controllers were supposed to be used as a stand-in for a mouse.

AMD just teased the Radeon RX 9070 yesterday at CES 2025 with very little in the way of specs or even a release date. However, because Team Red was demoing the Radeon RX 9070 at its booth with Call of Duty Black Ops 6 – which has a built-in Benchmark tool – I was able to get a quick peek how this next-gen GPU performs.

All told, at 4K Extreme settings without upscaling or frame generation, the Radeon RX 9070 was capable of an impressive 99fps average, even if it had the same visual bug as the Intel Arc B580 when I benchmarked it. Now, to be clear, this graphics card is running on very early alpha drivers, and that bug will more than likely be resolved by the time the card comes to market. But even on those early drivers, a solid 99fps is incredibly impressive.

Because I ran the benchmark without upscaling, rather than the vendor appropriate upscaling method that I use when I usually benchmark this game for graphics card reviews, I don't have a direct comparison I can make. However, even with DLSS on the 'Quality' setting, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super gets around 129fps on the same graphics preset at 4K. Given that DLSS adds about a 30% performance jump at the Quality setting, that may place the Radeon RX 9070 on equal footing with the 4080 Super – though I'd need to test the 4080 Super without DLSS to know for sure.

Some of the amazing performance of this benchmark is likely due to the CPU as well – the rig was running on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, a high-end gaming CPU that was also announced yesterday. But if this is the level of performance we can expect when the Radeon RX 9070 launches later this year, it's going to be an awesome card for anyone looking for a mid-range solution.

The benchmark also gives a bit of insight to the specs of the graphics card, though it is limited. The Radeon RX 9070 has 16GB of VRAM, though we still don't know how many graphics cores or at what clock speed the card is running at.

This is just one test, though, and I won't have a clear picture of how this graphics card will perform across a variety of games until I get it in the lab to put it through the full testing suite. But the sneak peek is definitely exciting.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

The Lenovo Legion Go was already one of the best handheld gaming PCs since it came out in 2023, but at CES Lenovo has unveiled two more handhelds at CES 2025, a lightweight Legion Go S, and a prototype of the much-awaited Lenovo Legion Go 2. It's available to preorder now at Best Buy.

The most noticable difference between the Legion Go S and the plain-old Legion Go is that this new, lighter model doesn't have the removable controllers of the original. Instead, the Legion Go S has a form factor that's more reminiscient of the Asus ROG Ally X or Steam Deck. Luckily, though, the new handheld retains the handy little trackpad beneath the face buttons that makes navigating Windows 11 much easier.

While everything would seem to point to the Lenovo Legion Go S being less powerful than the original handheld, Lenovo has actually improved some of the specs on offer. The Legion Go S will have up to 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, along with an improved 55.5WHr battery, which should lead to slightly longer battery life. The Legion Go S is also available with either an AMD Ryzen Z2 Go or Z1 Extreme processor.

At CES 2025, Nvidia has just revealed the GPUs behind the next generation of gaming laptops. The RTX 5000 mobile series is here, led, of course, by the GeForce RTX 5090.

Unlike its desktop lineup, Nvidia has revealed a full stack of mobile graphics cards, bookended by the RTX 5060 on the low-end and the RTX 5090 on the high-end. However, keep in mind that these mobile GPUs will be much less powerful than their desktop counterparts.

These new mobile GPUs are powering a wide swath of next-generation gaming laptops, also revealed at CES, from the likes of HP, MSI, Alienware and Asus. Nvidia is claiming that these new gaming laptops are significantly faster than laptops sporting last-generation parts, which is something I'll have to test once I get these devices in the lab.

If you want to get your hands on a gaming laptop with an RTX 5090, however, you should start to see them on store shelves in March.

Developing...

The Age of 4K Gaming Laptops?

While 4K gaming laptops have been a thing for a while, mobile-class graphics chips are usually a little too weak to handle the most demanding games at that resolution. While 4K performance on gaming laptops has certainly improved over the last couple of generations, there are still times where I try to boot up Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing on an RTX 4090 laptop, only to remember that it's a bit too ambitious.

With the RTX 5000 series, particularly the 5090, it looks like gaming laptops sporting 4K displays – which is becoming more common on high-end devices – will be much better equipped to play pretty much any game at native resolution.

Either way, I won't know exactly how these new GPUs will perform at 4K – or any resolution – until I'm able to benchmark it. Luckily, I won't have to wait long to see what the next generation of gaming laptops will look like.

Developing...

After months of waiting, Nvidia has finally announced its new line of graphics cards, led by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 at CES 2025. And while there are only a couple graphics cards at the Las Vegas tech show, the rest of the lineup should filter out over the next few months.

The star of the show is obviously the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, succeeding the massively powerful RTX 4090. And even if you can't fork over the cash for the RTX 5090, you can grab the RTX 5070, which allegedly provides RTX 4090 performance for $549.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 will come out January 30, for $1,999. The RTX 5090 will be accompanied by the RTX 5080 for $999, the RTX 5070 Ti for $749 and the RTX 5070 for $549.

Developing...

Kept Us Waiting, Huh?

While we all kind of knew a new graphics card is on the way, the RTX 4000 series graphics cards had one of the longest runs in a while. Usually, new graphics cards come out on a roughly 2-year cycle, coming out every other fall. However, Nvidia totally missed that mark – as did AMD – and delivered its cards about four months later than I would expect.

Likely a big part of that wait came down to the competition – or lack thereof. Right up until Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at CES, the RTX 4090 reigned as the most powerful dekstop graphics card on the market, with nothing from AMD or Intel even coming close. Perhaps that's why it remained a $2,000 graphics card through its entire lifespan.

Of course, with the RTX 5090 getting even more expensive, it seems like Nvidia is betting that this generation is going to follow the same shape as the last, with this flagship card having a wide lead on anything else on the market. Unfortunately, that also means more expensive graphics cards all around. It's possible that we'll see Nvidia launch an affordable 50-series graphics card over the next year or so, likely with the RTX 5060, but keep in mind that the RTX 4060 came out in June 2023 – a whopping 8 months after the RTX 4090 hit the market in October 2022.

Either way, with games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle adopting high-end tech like full ray tracing, a graphics card like the RTX 5090 is going to go a long way to making sure your gaming PC is up to snuff for years to come – or at least until the next Nvidia graphics cards come out.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

CES 2025 is an event that's always filled to the brim with exciting new products that'll be coming out for the next year, but Samsung is upping the ante by announcing a 3D gaming monitor.

The Samsung Odyssey 3D G90XF is a 27" gaming monitor that uses a lens built into the chassis, along with an AI algorithm to deliver a 3D gaming experience without the need for 3D glasses. The best part? You don't need 3D content to experience it, as the algorithm can convert some 2D content into 3D. Only time will tell if Samsung is able to pull it off. I haven't had the time to make it over to the Samsung booth, but I'll be sure to update this story if I'm able to scope it out.

This 3D monitor is just a part of a wide variety of gaming monitors Samsung is launching at the Las Vegas tech show. The tech giant also launched a new version of the Samsung M9 Smart Monitor, which will also use AI. This time, the AI is being used to scan the content you're watching and adjust the picture settings to make whatever content you're consuming look as good as it can be.

Of course, there are a couple of more traditional gaming monitors, too. Both the Samsung Odyssey G8 and G6 are getting a refresh, both of which are fairly standard 27" gaming monitors. Both of these monitors are way faster than before, with the Odyssey G8 sporting a 240Hz refresh rate with a 4K resolution, and the G6 clocking that all the way up to 500Hz at 1440p. Both of these resolution and refresh rate combos will require a behemoth of a graphics card, likely an RTX 4090 or something even more powerful.

Samsung hasn't announced the release dates or prices for any of these gaming monitors. However, with how advanced the Odyssey 3DG90XF seems, you can expect it to be expensive.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

AMD has revealed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D at CES 2025, two top-end gaming processors featuring Team Red's 3D V-Cache technology.

These processors follow the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D that launched back in November 2024, but with more cores, more cache, and a higher clock rate. The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D is a 16-core, 32-thread monster of a processor with 144MB of cache, which should make it one hell of a gaming chip.

AMD claims that these new processors boast up to 64% better gaming performance than the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, and up to 54% faster than the last-generation AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. This is likely due to 3D V-Cache tech, which allows AMD to print its cache in a layer below the actual CPU cores, lowering latency dramatically, and giving it room for more cache than would otherwise be possible.

I'll have to wait to get these processors in the lab to see how well they actually perform, but given how fast the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is, it's safe to say that these are going to be a perfect fit for a high-end gaming PC.

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D will be available sometime in the next few months, though AMD has not shared pricing information quite yet.

3D V-Cache?

Cache is incredibly important for gaming performance. Your CPU stores the data it needs to access most quickly in the cache, and with how big modern PC games are, you can never have too much fast memory. The only problem is, because it's located on the CPU itself, there isn't room for gigabytes of capacity. Instead, you'll typically see modern CPUs with a few megabytes of cache available. The 3D V-Cache on these X3D processors allows AMD to offer nearly double the cache of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K.

This extra cache capacity can directly lead to better gaming performance, as there is less data that needs to be offloaded to system memory, or RAM – which is significantly slower.

Just like the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the 9950X3D and 9900X3D also offer improvements over their previous-generation counterparts. This is mostly due to where the cache is located on the processor. With this generation, AMD moved the cache to a layer beneath the CPU cores, rather than above them. This means the CPU cores, which typically get much hotter under load, are directly under the metal lid of the processor, which means more direct contact with your CPU cooler. This leads to lower CPU temperatures, which ends up meaning better performance through Boost.

Keep in mind that I need to test these processors before I can actually recommend them, but they do look like they're going to be some of the best gaming chips on the market, especially if they're priced appropriately. Of course, AMD hasn't shared pricing information, so we have no idea if these processors are actually going to be a good value for the money yet. Only time will tell.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

At CES 2025, AMD has finally unveiled the chipset behind the next generation of handheld gaming PCs, the AMD Zen 2 Extreme.

The AMD Zen 2 Extreme, along with lower-specced cousins the Z2 and Z2 Go, are powered by Zen 5 CPU cores. While the Zen 2 Extreme is using a RDNA 3.5-based GPU, the Z2 and Z2 Go are still using RDNA 3 and RDNA 2, respectively. This creates an entire family of APUs (Advanced Processing Units) for handheld gaming PCs that should hopefully cause the price of handhelds to go down a bit.

With the Z2 Extreme, AMD is hoping to dramatically improve battery life, while also delivering console-like gaming performance to devices like the Lenovo Legion Go. By and large, the biggest limiting factor of these handhelds, especially at the high end, is how quickly their batteries drain when playing demanding games away from a wall outlet.

Mobile PC gaming is more than just handheld gaming PCs, and AMD has also launched its new lineup of Zen 5-based processors for gaming laptops, what it's calling "Fire Range" HX3D. These processors, just like the chips just announced by Intel, will be powering the best gaming laptops of the next year or so. Unlike Intel, however, AMD is bringing the successful 3D V-cache design behind the Ryzen 7 9800X3D to gaming laptops.

This technology allows AMD to stack much more cache on its processor by printing it above the actual CPU cores. This both improves gaming performance and lowers temperatures, which boosts gaming performance even further. I'll have to wait to get it into the lab to see exactly how these new processors perform, but if they're anything like their desktop counterparts, it'll be an exciting time for gaming laptops.

All of these mobile chipsets, from "Fire Range" HX3D to the AMD Z2 Extreme, will end up in gaming laptops and handhelds over the next few months.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

After months of waiting for new graphics cards, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT has finally been announced and will be powering gaming PCs within the next few months.

AMD has announced two graphics cards to spearhead its new generation: the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070. AMD is using this generation of GPUs to rebrand a little bit, signalling that these GPUs are of the same generation as the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. It's also to draw closer comparisons with Nvidia, with the RX 9070 intended to compete with similarly branded "mid-range" Nvidia cards, like the RTX 4070.

The RX 9070 XT is powered by the Zen 4 architecture, with all-new AI accelerators that enable AI upscaling in an AMD graphics card for the first time through FSR 4, or FidelityFX Super Resolution (more on that below). However, because AMD hasn't revealed the specs of these cards, I don't know how much of an improvement RDNA 4 will offer over AMD GPUs like the Radeon RX 7900 XT.

AMD hasn't revealed an exact release date for the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070, but has teased that it's coming sometime in Q1 2025. Likewise, Team Red hasn't revealed the price, though with it going up against an Nvidia xx70 GPU, I'd expect these graphics cards to cost anywhere from $499-$599 whenever they come out.

Welcome to the Next Generation

Along with the new graphics cards, AMD has also announced FSR 4. Just like the PSSR, or Playstation Spectral Super Resolution, that Sony worked on with AMD to create for the PS5 Pro, this new upscaling method will be based on a machine learning algorithm. However, unlike PSSR, which runs its AI algorithm directly on the shading cores, FSR 4 will be utilizing specialized AI accelerators in RDNA 4, similar to how DLSS is handled on Nvidia graphics cards.

This should substantially improve on both image quality and performance, thanks to Team Red finally utilizing the AI accelerators baked into each Compute Unit. AMD has also said that it has completely rebuilt its AI accelerators for this generation of cards, which explains why it has waited so long to implement an AI upscaler that can compete with the likes of XeSS and DLSS.

More importantly, this new upscaler finally marks a point where every GPU manufacturer has an AI upscaling solution. As long as developers continue to add all three upscalers to their games, which is becoming more common, this new generation of graphics cards might mark an end to Nvidia's complete domination of any game with ray tracing enabled.

However, with AMD only announcing the RX 9070 and drawing comparisons to the GeForce RTX 4070, Team Red doesn't seem to be punching for the top-end of the GPU market. Nvidia hasn't showed its next-generation hand yet, but assuming that the GeForce RTX 5090 – or whatever it's called – is significantly faster, AMD could just be leaving the super high end of the market for Nvidia, which is an approach that worked out well for Team Red in the RX 580 days.

With the Intel Arc B580 aiming for the budget market and these new AMD cards aiming towards mid-range users, it's refreshing to see two of the GPU makers competing in a range that people can actually afford, rather than launching extremely powerful (and expensive) cards into the stratosphere for the few that can comfortably drop a couple grand on a new GPU.

Intel's new card ended up being a nice surprise when I reviewed it back in December 2024. I won't know how these cards actually perform until I can get them in the lab for testing, but I'm actually hopeful that they'll provide a good value for PC gamers. It's been a while.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

At CES 2025, Intel has announced that Arrow Lake, the CPU architecture behind the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, is coming to gaming laptops.

Just like their desktop counterparts, these laptop processors will include a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit), which should greatly improve AI performance. However, also like their desktop counterparts, most laptops with an Arrow Lake-HX or H processor will also have a dedicated GPU, which will relegate the NPU to lighter background AI tasks, like managing your battery.

Regardless, these Intel Core Ultra 200HX processors are going to be featured in some of the best gaming PCs of the next year or so. The CPUs will feature up to 24 cores on the high end, with the Core Ultra 9 285HX featuring 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. Just like previous generations of Intel processors, the performance cores are reserved for heavier, focused work, while the efficiency cores will focus on background tasks.

Unlike previous generations, the performance cores are single-threaded, just like their desktop counterparts. However, through IPC improvements Intel was able to make with this generation, it claims it doesn't lose much in the way of performance.

If you want to get your hands on a gaming laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 200H or 200HX processor, you'll start seeing them on store shelves over the next few months.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra