Nvidia is launching a Blackwell gaming chipset for PCs called the RTX 50-series

Nvidia Blackwell unveiled new chips for desktop and laptop computers on Monday that use the same Blackwell architecture that powers the company’s fastest artificial intelligence processors for servers and data centers.

The chips, called GeForce RTX 50-series, will come pre-installed in computers priced between approximately $550 and $2,000, the company said. Laptops with the chips will start shipping in March.

Nvidia unveiled the processors at CES in Las Vegas, where CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote speech on Monday.

“Can you imagine having this amazing graphics card, Blackwell, I’m going to shrink it down and put it over there,” Huang said, holding up a laptop.

Nvidia, which has rose It has a market cap of over $3.5 trillion by selling AI chips to giant cloud vendors and other technology companies, and until the past few years was best known for selling graphics processing units (GPUs) to power video games. Nvidia’s first chip was designed in late 1999 to quickly draw triangles and polygons for 3D games.

“Of course, at the time, we were a gaming company, and these GPUs were created to accelerate games,” Justin Walker, senior product manager at Nvidia, said on a press call.

Wall Street is less enthusiastic about Nvidia’s gaming business these days given the explosion in artificial intelligence and the ever-increasing demand for more processing power. in a fourth That ended in October, Nvidia’s gaming sales accounted for less than 10% of total revenue, compared with 88% of data center chips.

Nvidia owns the vast majority of the AI ​​GPU market for data centers, outpacing competitors Advanced micro devices and Intel.

But CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is all about consumer products, and the new chips announced Monday are primarily for gaming.

Nvidia says the RTX 50 series chips will support a feature called DLSS 4 that uses artificial intelligence to boost gaming frame rates. They can also display characters’ faces in more detail, and will generally provide users with better graphics and higher resolution.

Nvidia’s gaming business is growing, with revenue up 15% year over year in the latest quarter. But data center sales have at least doubled for six straight quarters, topping $30 billion most recently.

Nvidia says the technical improvements made to its massive AI business will trickle down to its gaming graphics cards.

“Even though we are now an AI company as well as a gaming company, our gaming side still benefits greatly from the fact that we are an AI company,” Walker said.

The Blackwell GPU architecture and basic design used by the 50-series chips first appeared in the company’s AI accelerators, which were Announced in March It began shipping later last year. Nvidia said it was designed and optimized to run the neural networks used by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google twin.

The new chips for PCs and laptops will come in a number of different configurations. The company says the most expensive and powerful chip, the RTX 5090, will retail individually for $1,999 and is twice as fast as its predecessor, the RTX 4090. Nvidia says it has 92 billion transistors, compared to the company’s 208 billion transistors. B200 GPU for servers.

Nvidia says the chips will be optimized to run AI models and do computer graphics, not just run the latest games. The chips will be powerful enough for some game makers to integrate generative AI into their characters in games like “PUBG: Battlegrounds.”

The new processors will also be powerful enough to run large language models and image generation models from companies including… deadMistral and AI stability, Nvidia said.

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