The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 release date could be as soon as Jan 21, 2025, according to a new leak. This would mean the first of the new Nvidia RTX 5000 series GPUs could be winging its way to your door only a couple of weeks after its expected announcement next week.
Nvidia is believed to be announcing its RTX 5000 series of cards at the CES 2025 trade show in Las Vegas on January 6. While the flagship of the range is the highly anticipated RTX 5090, it’s the RTX 5080 that is believed to be the first of the cards to become available, and this new leak suggests buyers really won’t have long to wait.
The leak comes from a now-removed post on X (formerly Twitter) from user @hkepcmedia, (via videocardz.com) who wrote simply “5080 -> 21 Jan.” While this message isn’t explicitly saying the RTX 5080 release date will be Jan 21, it’s reasonable to interpret it this way. Regardless of whether that was hkepcmedia’s intention or not, it is of course still just speculation, with no official word from Nvidia yet.
As to when we can expect an official word, Nvidia is hosting the keynote conference that will kick off CES next week, where it’s widely anticipated to be using this platform to announce a range of consumer graphics cards based on its Blackwell GPU architecture that it announced back in March. That’s the same core design as has been selling in the hundreds of thousands for use in AI data centers, propelling the company to become the most valuable in the world.
This new architecture is expected to push the flagship RTX 5090 to be around 50% faster than the RTX 4090, with reports of the GPU consuming over 550W of power. The RTX 5080, though, is expected to be a more modest upgrade with RTX 5080 specs leaks suggesting it will house 10,750 CUDA cores, which is just a few hundred more than the 10,240 cores of the existing RTX 4080 Super. In comparison, the RTX 5090 is expected to have 21,760, which is a big upgrade over the 16,384 of the RTX 4090.
While this may seem disappointing, a crucial new addition to these new cards is expected to be GDDR7 VRAM, which provides significantly faster data transfers. Along with possible architectural improvements, this could help ensure the RTX 5080 is comfortably faster than its current gen equivalents.
While we wait for official word from Nvidia on its brand new lineup, why not check out our best graphics card guide to find out exactly what our top picks are right now so you’ll know how they compare to the new models Nvidia announces. Also, you could check out what we’re expecting from AMD next week too, with its RX 9000 series GPUs – including the RX 9070 – also expected to get an official unveiling.