The GeForce RTX 5090, NVIDIA’s new flagship GPU for gamers and creators based on the “Blackwell” architecture, is not only much more powerful—but also far more expensive—than the GeForce RTX 5080, and the reason for that is because today’s enthusiasts demand the “absolute best” and have no issue paying for that level of leading performance, according to new comments that NVIDIA co-founder, president, and CEO Jensen Huang shared during a recent interview at CES 2025 with global media.
“The reason is simple. Once someone wants the best product, they will always choose the best,” Huang explained after a reporter inquired during the event as to why NVIDIA created such a large difference between the flagship and near-flagship models, with not only the number of CUDA cores in the GeForce RTX 5090 being double that of the 5080, but the price as well ($1,999 vs. $999).
“You know, the market isn’t so segmented,” elaborated Huang. “And our enthusiasts, if they want the best, they won’t settle for something slightly better or save $100 by choosing something a bit worse. They just want the best.”
“Of course, $2,000 is not a small amount, and it’s certainly a high value,” he continued. “But keep in mind that this technology is being used in your home theater-level PC setup. And that PC—where you’ve probably already invested around $10,000 in your monitor and sound system—will definitely need the best GPU. So many of our customers are simply after the absolute best.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Huang is asked as to why the GeForce RTX 5070 only has 12 GB of memory, and the reason for that seems to do with NVIDIA’s need to find the right balance.
“We’ve always been looking for the optimal balance between the compute engine, computational power, bandwidth, and memory capacity,” Huang explained. “While it’s difficult to achieve perfection, that’s our goal. Memory and computational power need to match. Too much memory would waste computational resources, and too much computational power would be limited by memory capacity. Finding this balance is a significant challenge for us.”
“What are your expectations for the 60 series?” another reporter later asked.
“Last night, we released four RTX Blackwell GPUs, and even the lowest-performing one surpassed the strongest GPUs on the market today. That’s truly incredible,” Huang replied. “This really demonstrates the power of AI technology. Without innovations like AI, Tensor Cores, and DLSS 4, we couldn’t achieve this level of performance. As for the 60 series, I don’t have anything particularly special to say.”
Discussion (5 replies)
Join Discussion →He’s not wrong.
nVidia will give you whatever you’re willing to pay for.
Leaves room for a 5080 Ti or Super.
Hell it leaves room for a 5085 ti super special turbo edition.
Yep and the fact that laptop getting released overseas essentially has a cutdown 5080 die with 24 GB VRAM seems like a decent indicator there could be something else down the road. That is unless the promo materials had the wrong info on them . . .
Pretty much true. They've got almost every sector covered.