A prominent hardware leaker has claimed that the Nvidia RTX 5080 could be coming out ahead of the RTX 5090 flagship model, which goes against everything we’ve heard up until now.
As reported by Wccftech, Kopite7kimi has alleged that RTX 5080 will be the first Blackwell gaming graphics card Nvidia will release. In a post on Twitter, this leaker doubled down about the RTX 5090 coming later. It’s in direct contrast to what we’ve previously reported on, with the third-generation BFGPU heavily rumoured to be the only card debuting this year. Kopite7kimi has a good track record but shows little evidence for an RTX 5080-first approach. Recent history suggests Nvidia will likely lead with its flagship before anything else.
To understand the release schedule of Nvidia GPU hardware we need to look back at past examples. That’s because RTX 4090 debuted in October 2022 with RTX 4080 releasing a month later. We can go back even further to the launch of Ampere hardware in 2022, with RTX 3090 coming out at the start of September and RTX 3080 following a couple of weeks later.
Traditionally, Nvidia tends to lead with its top-end hardware before the mid-range and mainstream offerings hit the shelves. RTX 5090 will supposedly feature the GB202 die with GDDR7 memory, a 512-bit memory bus, and a 450W TDP, making it an easy contender for the best graphics card ever made and dwarfing what’s possible with the RTX 4090. In comparison, RTX 5080 appears to be more iterative, built on the smaller GB203 die with GDDR7 memory, a 256-bit memory bus, and a 320W TDP.
We would love to see the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 released this year, but it’s not looking like the most likely possibility, as other sources have alleged. It’s possible Nvidia could formally unveil its gaming Blackwell GPU series at Computex next month, which would clear up the confusion. We’ll be bringing you the latest on this story as it continues to develop.
