SANTA CLARA, September 15 — Nvidia’s RTX 50-series has reignited a fight over what a graphics card is actually worth, and the numbers behind it are not flattering to the company’s gaming division. The California-based chip designer, founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, unveiled the RTX 50-series at CES 2025 in Las Vegas in January 2025. The flagship RTX 5090 carries a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $1,999, against $1,599 for the RTX 4090 at its October 2022 launch — a 25% increase.
The RTX 5080 is priced at $999, the RTX 5070 Ti at $749 and the RTX 5070 at $549, all above the launch MSRPs of their predecessors: $1,199 for the RTX 4080, $799 for the RTX 4070 Ti and $599 for the RTX 4070.
The gap between the keynote and the review bench
Nvidia claims the RTX 5090 offers roughly twice the performance of the RTX 4090 when using DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, a new AI-powered feature that generates up to three additional frames per rendered frame. Independent reviews published in January 2025 found something rather more modest under the hood. In raw rasterization at 4K, without DLSS, the RTX 5090 is only about 30% faster than the RTX 4090.
That discrepancy has driven a surge in cost-per-frame analysis, which divides a GPU’s price by its average frame rate in games. According to reviews from outlets including Gamers Nexus and TechSpot, the RTX 5090’s cost per frame at 4K is approximately $10.50, against about $8.00 for the RTX 4090 at its launch.
The RTX 5080, at $999, delivers performance only slightly above the RTX 4080 Super, which launched in January 2024 at $999, giving a cost per frame of around $8.30 at 4K. The RTX 4070, launched at $599 in April 2023, offered a cost per frame of about $6.50 at 1440p. The RTX 5070 at $549 is only marginally faster than the RTX 4070 Super, which launched in January 2024 at $599, and its cost per frame is roughly $5.80 at 1440p, against $5.20 for the 4070 Super.
Where the silicon goes
The RTX 50 series is based on the Blackwell architecture, which also powers Nvidia’s data center GPUs. The gaming variants are produced on a different process node and carry lower margins. The financials explain the emphasis.
Nvidia’s data center business generated $47.5 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025, ending January 2025, up from $15 billion the year before. Gaming revenue for the same period was $11.4 billion, up from $10.4 billion.
Gross margin for fiscal 2025 was 75%, driven largely by data center sales. Total revenue was $60.9 billion. Gaming revenue had peaked at $12.5 billion in fiscal 2022, dipped to $9.1 billion in fiscal 2023 and recovered to $10.4 billion in fiscal 2024.
Huang has publicly stated that AI is the company’s primary growth driver, and during the CES 2025 keynote he emphasised that the RTX 50 series is designed for AI-enhanced gaming rather than raw performance gains. The reaction on social media and forums including Reddit’s r/pcmasterrace and r/nvidia has been largely negative, with users frustrated by the lack of meaningful generational performance improvements at lower price points.
Some have pointed to AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX, launched in December 2022 at $999, which offers 24GB of VRAM and competitive rasterization performance, as better value, though it lacks Nvidia’s DLSS and ray tracing superiority. Intel’s Arc A770, launched in October 2022 at $349, provides a budget option with lower performance. The row has revived discussion of a GPU market where prices have risen steadily since the crypto-mining boom of 2020-2021.
Prices soared on miner demand and normalised after the Ethereum merge in September 2022, but launch MSRPs have kept climbing. Nvidia’s market capitalisation surpassed $3 trillion in June 2024. As the RTX 50 series reaches shelves in January and February 2025, the cost-per-frame argument is unlikely to settle on its own.
Watch whether Nvidia adjusts pricing in response to the backlash — and whether Blackwell’s gaming derivatives ever get the same attention as the accelerators paying the bills.
