Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang kicked off CES 2025 with a keynote that was filled with new product announcements and visionary demonstrations of how the company plans to advance the field of AI. The first product that Huang unveiled was the GeForce RTX 50 series of consumer graphics processing units (GPUs). The series is also called RTX Blackwell because it is based on Nvidia’s latest Blackwell microarchitecture design for next generation data center and gaming applications. To showcase RTX Blackwell’s prowess, Huang played an impressively photorealistic video sequence of rich imagery under contrasting light ranges — all rendered in real time.

RTX 50 will succeed the current RTX 40 series that tops out with the world’s current fastest GPU card, RTX 4090, which sells for $1,590. The audience was blown away when Huang announced that the entry level RTX 5070 would not only have the same performance as RTX 4090, but sell for just $549.

To boot, the RTX 5070 even uses half the power as the RTX 4090.

Huang explained the technological advances in RTX Blackwell would not have been possible if not for artificial intelligence.

After a pixel is generated, AI can then be conditioned on that pixel to generate other pixels of the image because AI is aware of how the new pixels should appear based on models trained on a supercomputer hosted at Nvidia. This enables the neural network running on the GPU card to infer and predict new pixel appearances. The basis of this process is known as Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).

In the latest generation of DLSS in RTX Blackwell, AI also generates new video frames via a similar manner. Specifically, three additional frames are generated for every frame that is rendered via calculations. For example, four video frames at 4K resolution have about 33 million pixels, but with DLSS we would need to compute only 2 million pixels. Consequently, RTX Blackwell is able to render computer graphics at incredibly high efficiency.

Huang acknowledged that an enormous amount of training went into producing the models. But once the models are trained, generation can readily use them.

He capped this segment of the keynote by showing that RTX 5070 can fit into a laptop form factor for a retail price of $1,299. The top two models of the GeForce RTX 50 series will be available by the end of this month with the remaining models arriving in February.

Related:
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Keynote at CES 2025 (Video)