Wait, what? Nvidia’s RTX 50-series might launch this month

Nvidia’s RTX 50-series graphics cards are coming — we know that for a fact. But when? The release dates of these graphics cards have been the topic of much speculation. Early leakers predicted that they’d launch in late 2024, but the general consensus slowly shifted toward an early 2025 release instead.

The roller coaster ride continues today, with news that turns the whole thing on its head again: Nvidia’s RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 might hit the market this month.

This time, the leak comes from Benchlife, which reported that the RTX 5090D and the RTX 5080D, built on Blackwell architecture, are scheduled for an official launch in September. The “D” refers to the versions that are released on the Chinese market, so even if true, this leak could be a China-exclusive — only it wouldn’t make any sense for Nvidia to launch its new GPUs in any other way than worldwide. Once the RTX 50-series arrives, it’ll arrive everywhere at roughly the same time.

As the publication hasn’t shared anything else, it’s hard to determine whether this is a leak or a semi-outdated hope that we’ll see the graphics cards this year. However, the late 2024 timeline always fit better with what Nvidia has done with the last few generations of its GPUs. The RTX 20-series, RTX 30-series, and the RTX 40-series all launched two years apart around the final quarter of the year.

An announcement in September also doesn’t have to mean that the GPUs would become available the same month — we might see them in October, or even November. Nvidia doesn’t typically announce its products more than a quarter in advance, so an announcement in September and a release date in January just don’t add up.

Benchlife also corroborates what we’ve already reported on: The RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080 might see an increase in power consumption. The latest leaks pin the RTX 5090 at a whopping 600 watts, and the RTX 5080 at 400W. Both mark an increase from the current generation.

Will Nvidia truly launch its next-gen GPUs this month? At this point, It’s hard to know what to believe. It would certainly be a highlight to what might turn out to be a fairly disappointing year for PC hardware, but it’s too early to bank on it. Rumor has it that AMD’s RDNA 4 and Intel’s Battlemage GPUs might not appear until early 2025, so Nvidia has no reason to hurry up.