We might be skeptical of some Nvidia claims, like whether a $549 RTX 5070 will actually offer the performance of a $1,599 RTX 4090. But it’s almost impossible not to be impressed by the RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition, where Nvidia has 575 watts of power graph. including 21,760 CUDA cores and 32GB of GDDR7 memory, in a video card just two slots wide.
You almost have to see it to believe it, and we sent my colleague Antonio around the CES show floor in Las Vegas on what was initially a fruitless search. No PC maker seemed to have an interactive gaming demo running on a 5090, much less the two-slot card.
But on Wednesday we finally saw the real deal at Nvidia’s external event, and then some. It’s heavy, and the exceptionally desirable $2,000 card may end up being rare, but it’s here and it works.
Below, find our images of the relatively compact 5090; its incredibly compact PCB with the Blackwell chip on top; a game demo running on the 5090; an image of the Founder’s 5090, 5080 and 5070 editions side by side; and some examples of how bulky other partners’ cards can be compared to Nvidia’s.