At CES, Nvidia dropped the mic while Radeon dropped the ball

Only time will tell how much this fumble hurts AMD in 2025.

- THIAGO TREVISAN

CES 2025 was packed with all kinds of techie announcements, but for me the highlight was all the new graphics cards. Nvidia and AMD both played their hands with next-generation products, with some caveats.

Nvidia certainly stole the show, with the GeForce RTX 50 Series announcement (fave.co/3WIcVja) serving as the key opening message in CEO Jensen Huang's keynote speech. AMD was much softer in its talk, with sparse details on its new RDNA 4 graphics cards (fave.co/4jgbdcF), resulting in similarly sparse enthusiasm (fave.co/4jfFybl).

Let's go over what we learned from both companies about their GPUs and where your attention should be in 2025.

THE GOOD AND THE ALMOST GOOD...

Right off the bat, here's the good news for us: We're definitely getting some new GPUs, starting with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50 Series. The top dog in that group will be the RTX 5090, featuring a staggering 32GB of fast GDDR7 VRAM. According to Nvidia, it may be as much as twice as fast as the outgoing flagship RTX 4090.

While that's certainly impressive, Nvidia is likely basing its claims on its DLSS 4 numbers, which feature several new technologies that help it achieve all this. Chief among them is Multi Frame Generation, using the power of artificial intelligence to reach higher peaks in performance (fave.co/4hczD4M) with little to no apparent drawbacks.

Even more impressive is the claim by Nvidia that the new RTX 5070 will have similar performance to the RTX 4090. That's a bold statement, considering that the RTX 5070 will have an MSRP of $549 while the RTX 4090 sold with an MSRP of $1,599. (More on this later, as once again AI is a big factor in these results.)