Nvidia's GPU Strategy Shift: From Gaming to AI and Back Again?

Nvidia says it shipped twice as many 50-series GPUs as 40-Series at launch, but it's a misleading comparison

The only problem is the first five weeks of Ada only had RTX 4090 cards available. It's been a very busy year so far for GPUs, with Nvidia launching the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 in the span of just two months. AMD also launched its RX 9070 XT and RX 9070, while Intel released the Arc B580 late last year and the Arc B570 in mid-January. The only problem? Outside of the Arc B570 (kind of but not really), every GPU launched so far has ended up being sold out or severely overpriced. But have no fear, because Nvidia claims it has shipped twice as many Blackwell GPUs as Ada during the first five weeks of each product series. The only problem is that the comparison is questionable, at best. The above chart looks pretty good, right? And then you go check the data and discover that the RTX 4090 launched on October 12, 2022, and was the only Ada GPU for the first five weeks -- the RTX 4080 arrived on November 16, 2022, exactly five weeks and one day later. By comparison, the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 both launched on January 30, 2025; the RTX 5070 Ti arrived on February 20; and the RTX 5070 just came out on March 5. So, in the first five weeks, Nvidia appears to be comparing the sole halo card from its Ada Lovelace and RTX 40-series GPUs to the first four Blackwell and RTX 50-series GPUs -- or at least, that's how we read it. If we were to get a more direct comparison, we'd need to look at the first five weeks of the 4090 and 4080, plus the first two weeks of the 4070 Ti, plus the first day of the 4070. We think it's a safe bet that all those added together would easily eclipse the number of RTX 50-series GPUs shipped so far. Even at the most simplistic level, Blackwell had two GPUs (5090 and 5080) launch on the same day compared to one GPU for Ada (4090), so shipping twice as many would be the baseline. This was a 'great' way to obfuscate the number of units shipped and claim to have shipped more inventory than in the past. It also completely neglects the fact that RTX 30-series GPUs were still relatively available right up to the launch of the 40-series, while the 40-series cards have been disappearing from shelves since last fall. We're told that more RTX 50-series GPUs are being produced, and Nvidia and its add-in board (AIB) partners are making them as fast as possible, but hard numbers are not something anyone is willing to disclose. However you want to slice it, Nvidia's latest GPUs are hard to come by. The current lowest prices online have just one RTX 5070 for $739 at Newegg, with third-party scalpers listing RTX 5070 cards at Amazon for $900 or more. RTX 5070 Ti starts at $1,149, the 5080 costs $1,609 or more, and the RTX 5090... you don't even want to know. (None are listed at PC Part Picker, but on eBay during the past 30 days the average sold 5090 at auction cost nearly $4,500, with 194 units sold.) AMD's RX 9070 series GPUs aren't doing much better, with an $853 RX 9070 on Amazon and a $939 RX 9070 XT also at Amazon. It could be a long wait for supply to catch up to demand, needless to say. Besides making some misleading, at best, claims about Blackwell RTX availability, Nvidia also discussed the advances it's working with developers to enable DLSS 4 MFG and upscaling, Neural Shading, and ACE. RTX Remix officially left beta today as well, and there will be a public Half-Life 2 RTX demo available on March 18, offering vastly improved visuals compared to the original game that's now over 20 years old. [Ed: Where's my cane?] You can see the rest of the announcements in the above slide deck. There's more marketing hype around the performance boost offered by DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation (MFG), which, as we discussed in our own in-depth testing, tends to be a highly inflated way of looking at performance. It's not that MFG is bad, per se, but even Nvidia's own numbers should cause some raised eyebrows. Like this performance result from Portal RTX: Updates to the RTX Remix toolset combined with neural rendering features like the neural radiance cache deliver more than double the performance compared to the Remix beta. And then we look at the details. Base RTX Remix beta performance was 125 FPS -- that's with DLSS 3.5 and frame generation. Runtime optimizations and texture streaming account for a 22% increase, and there's another 18% improvement from the neural radiance cache. Together, those would result in performance of 175 FPS, an impressive 40% improvement. Then DLSS 4 MFG4X, on top of that, "increases" performance by 73%. But what it really does is drop the base non-framegen performance from ~88 FPS to ~76 FPS. Either way, it's still running fast enough that the result should be very playable and look incredibly smooth, particularly if you have a 240 Hz 4K monitor. But that's also with an RTX 5090, which in our testing provides up to 60% higher performance than the RTX 5080 for demanding ray traced games, 75% higher performance than the RTX 5070 Ti, and 143% more performance than the RTX 5070. By those metrics, 4K with performance upscaling and MFG4X on an RTX 5070 might only get around 125 FPS in Portal RTX on an RTX 5070, and it would feel more like 31 FPS in terms of input sampling and latency. That's still playable, but nowhere near what the MFG numbers might suggest in terms of user experience. 120 FPS via MFG isn't the same feel as a native 120 FPS, or even 120 FPS with regular framegen. And how will Half-Life 2 RTX run, given it's presumably an even more demanding game? We'll find out next week. As we've noted in so many of our recent GPU reviews, the fundamental problem is supply and demand. The demand -- and record $130 billion in revenue -- for AI and data center GPUs and hardware dwarfs what Nvidia or any other company might make on consumer GPUs for gaming right now. Until that changes, we're not likely to see sufficient supply to meet demand for gaming GPUs, never mind finding GPUs available at their ostensible MSRPs.

When the AI hype dies, I hope Nvidia pivots back to gaming

Table of Contents Table of Contents Humble pie kills hubris I still love the stupid halo cards Get more gamers onboard Come back to the fold Nvidia doesn't seem to care about gaming much anymore. From its lacklustre Blackwell RTX 50 launch, to its stock price booming as its H100s were used in all manner or AI training, to hyperbolic marketing that suggests we should just take our fake frames and be happy about it. Nvidia's clearly more of an AI company these days. But I hope that doesn't last. This is the company that brought us iconic gaming graphics cards, like the 1080 Ti and the ludicrous 4090. It popularized dynamic upscaling with DLSS, and helped make raytracing kind-of viable. But it's been very clear for a number of years that gaming is not Nvidia's major focus, and indeed this past one, makes it feel like an afterthought. Recommended Videos I really hope if and when the AI hype dies down, or the bubble bursts, that Nvidia returns to its roots and makes some great gaming hardware again. Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming ReSpec Subscribe Check your inbox! Privacy Policy Humble pie kills hubris If gaming became a bigger focus for Nvidia again, it would have take it more seriously. That would mean coming to terms with some of the negative habits it's cultivated in recent years. Instead of taking the gaming market for granted, it would need to be more aggressive with its pricing, making more of its higher-end graphics cards more affordable. That might even mean it stopped undercutting its board partners with overbuilt Founders Editions, so they can be more creative with their designs without sky-rocketing the price. Maybe Nvidia could sweet talk EVGA to come back too? How fun would it be see KINGPIN cards make a comeback? It would have to start putting more than 8GB of VRAM on its most affordable graphics cards, too. If there's one thing I wish it would do, though, it's be more honest about its products. Jensen Huang confidently stating that the RTX 5070 would offer RTX 4090 performance ("with AI") is as close to an outright lie you can get without actually doing so -- it's not even faster than the 4070 Super all the time. It could stop using misleadingly labelled graphs and show real frames per second against its own cards, and the competition. It could highlight native performance, like AMD did during its recent RX 9070 XT debut. I still love the stupid halo cards I am a staunch critic of Nvidia's predatory, monopolistic practices. Its price increases in recent generations have been laughable, and the RTX 50 launch has been downright insulting. But I'd be a liar if I said I didn't love the ridiculousness of its Titan-esque halo cards. The RTX 1080 Ti, the RTX 3090 Ti, the RTX 4090. Less so the RTX 5090, but still, it's bonkers. Look how tiny the actual PCB is. Look at how the power connectors are melting again because these graphics cards are so ridiculous. They're the fastest cards there's even been at the time of their release. The lizard part of my brain that just likes to see the numbers go up loves what the hardware can do, and the jaded tech journalist side of me adores the unique ways they pushed the boundaries of what's possible. I'd love it if graphics cards were more competitive, and I'd love to see AMD take a shot at the top spot again even if it doesn't make much financial sense. But I also want to see Nvidia do crazy Nvidia stuff. Just make a 1,000W GPU that needs its own power supply already. Why not? Get more gamers onboard If Nvidia took gaming more seriously, it could make some of its best features more applicable to more people. As it stands, some of its flagship gaming features, like DLSS and raytracing, are effectively paywall locked behind the highest-end graphics cards. Even almost seven years on from the debut of these new features with the RTX 20 series, and no one I know uses raytracing outside of those with the most high-end graphics cards. And how many people do you know who have an XX90 class card? I work in this industry and I only know a couple. Cyberpunk 2077 - DLSS 4 Gameplay DLSS at the very least should be just as usable on an XX60 card as it is on an XX90. The whole point of the high-end card is that it has the local rendering power to do what the lower-end cards can't. Giving it more Tensor cores so that it can DLSS even harder than the cards that actually need the help is backwards. The same goes for raytracing. The 5090 has all the power it needs to drive high frame rates in most games. Giving it almost four times the RT cores of the 5070 just seems unfair. The 5070 is the card that needs that extra help tracing those paths. Sure, make the future 6090 faster in all senses than every other card, but couldn't we have it so that turning on raytracing on low-end cards doesn't mean making major sacrifices? Come back to the fold Nvidia really botched the RTX 50 series, and the RTX 40-series wasn't that impressive either. But its tanking reputation doesn't have to continue to slide -- if it starts treating gamers as more than an afterthought. The AI boom won't last forever, and though Nvidia's datacenter business will certainly remain a more profitable part of it than consumer hardware, the gaming market will always be an important component in its system. If Nvidia wants to see off new competition from AMD and Intel, and the ever-greater-encroachment from ARM, it needs to rethink its approach: Fairer pricing, more competitive mid-range options with democratised features, would be a great start. That doesn't mean ditching the crazy designs and over the top GPUs that push the boundaries of what's possible -- I want to see more of that, not less -- but that can be folded into a more cohesive strategy that understands what gamers actually want and need: Affordable GPUs that let them enjoy a more customized, performative experience than consoles and handhelds. If Nvidia wants to keep being the best, it needs to act like it still cares.