Nvidia will spend the summer prepping for the launch of its next-generation Blackwell GPUs. We're still not sure what it will bring to market first or when. But a new report says Nvidia is already testing a range of cards with varying levels of power consumption—from 250W all the way up to 600W. As always, we'll have to wait and see how far Nvidia wants to push the envelope.
The new information regarding Nvidia's plans for its Blackwell GPUs comes from Benchlife, which has featured a steady stream of Nvidia news lately. It says Nvidia's 250W version of Blackwell will be focused on efficiency while offering a compact size, which should delight folks with a toaster-sized small form factor (SFF) build, while the 600W GPU is for those who don't care about power consumption at all (*raises hand). However, Nvidia could also be testing the cooler it's built for Blackwell or just testing an extreme version of its GPU to see how it performs overall before scaling it down a bit.
If you recall, we heard similar rumors about the RTX 40 series before they were announced, as noted by TechPowerUp. There were plenty of rumors about an 800W Titan-class GPU, which never materialized. Ultimately, the flagship RTX 4090 arrived with the same TDP as its predecessor—the RTX 3090 Ti—at 450W. However, the move from Ampere to Ada involved a significant node jump, from Samsung 8nm to TSMC 5nm, which will not be the case now. Nvidia is using TSMC N4P for Blackwell, a refined version of its 5nm process but reportedly customized for Nvidia, so it's unclear what level of performance Nvidia will offer this time.
However, early reports have concluded that Nvidia is targeting an uplift of 70% for the RTX 5090 over the RTX 4090, essentially what it offered going from Ampere to Ada. There is also a lot of uncertainty over what Nvidia will launch first, as it was reported it would introduce the 5090 this year and the rest of the lineup next year. That rumor was then squashed by a report saying Nvidia would launch with the RTX 5080, which was how it used to introduce new architectures in the Kepler, Maxwell, and Turing days. The RTX 5080 is expected to be a beast of a card, though, as it's been rumored to be faster than the RTX 4090 in ray tracing.
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