It’s not long since everyone (including us) were reporting that the RTX 5080 will release earlier than the flagship 5090, but now an additional detail makes it clearer as to how this will go down. It turns out that there won’t be much of a wait between the two high-end graphics cards, at least according to a recent rumor. This is another piece of the RTX 50 series release date puzzle.
Plenty of leaks and rumors have been surfacing lately – the biggest being some leaked 5090 specs – but we still expect the 5080 to come first. This follows a similar pattern to what we saw in the earlier RTX 30 series as well, so don’t be massively surprised.
They’ll be announced at the same time, but availability is ‘a few weeks’ apart
There has already been a couple of a twists and turns in this story. If you’ve been following the progress as closely as we have, you’ll see that TechPowerUp initially reported that the 5090 will be the only one to arrive in 2024. This was challenged by well-respected leaker kopite7kimi, who retorted that the 5080 will instead come first. At the very least, we expect to see Nvidia launch both of these towards the end of 2024.
An additional comment from XpeaGPU (another prominent source of GPU leaks) adds to that by saying they “should be announced at [the] same time”. However, availability will be separated by a few weeks. Looking back to the RTX 30 series, we can see that the RTX 3080 launched on September 17th, 2023, followed up by the RTX 3090 just a week later on September 24th. For this year’s series, we could see something similar.
Is this the same as last gen?
No, the 40 series release schedule worked a little differently. It was the current flagship RTX 4090 first to arrive on October 12th, 2022. We had to wait until November 16th that year to see the RTX 4080, which was then superseded by the 4080 Super early this year. Thankfully so, as it desperately needed a revision.
Given the fact that the launch of the 4080 was less than impressive, Nvidia likely want to avoid a similar scenario as everyone had already been blown away by the flagship, making the xx80 card look like shoddy value for money (it was to be fair). We expect the 5090 to be an absolute beast which is well out of most people’s price range, teeing up the 5080 to be many enthusiasts’ choice.
