Should you wait for Nvidia’s 50 series GPUs?

Looking for a GPU, you might be wondering if the RTX 50 series is worth the wait

Sebastian Kozlowski

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Considering a new GPU is hard when there always seems to be another one coming soon, so should you wait for Nvidia’s 50 series GPUs? With the 40 series still alive and beating, you might not be too impressed with what’s on offer or always something on the horizon that might be a bit more tempting as always and might offer a bit more if you can wait.

The 40 series came out towards the end of 2022 with the launch of the RTX 4090 in October of that year. Since then it has expanded to a whole selection of powerful GPUs across the range. But not all of them bring the same excitement and value as each other. Nvidia’s GPUs always have that strength and power across the board. As we see Team Green expanding in its AI sector, that’s the real money maker for it now, as we saw last year’s income split Nvidia may not care as much for gaming after the drop in income from that sector. So could that change and improve in the coming releases?

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The value of the 40 series

Although the performance of the whole range of GPUs is quite high, that might not tell the whole story especially when it comes to the price and value of them. But even if you think it might be bad, the options do surprise us mostly. Looking at Techspots 4080 Super Review, we can see what the cost per frame is compared to MSRP but also to Newegg prices.

There we see the AMD GPUs leading at least at 1440p at MSRP, but with its price drops especially on older options, that includes even more options, even the newer 7700 and 7800 XT. At 4K the 4070 Super drops its head in, but it’s not designed for it exactly, even though it dabbles it has a more limited memory compared to other choices, but once again market prices favor AMD.

But Nvidia has other things going for it. Ray tracing is notoriously well-optimized and works much better on Team Green’s hardware and AMD falls behind, the same is true for encoding and getting work done on your PC. This does make AMD a great value just for gaming, but in general, Nvidia would still take the lead.

So is it worth waiting for the RTX 50 series?

Supposedly the RTX 50 series release is expected in Q4 2024 or Q1 2025 at the latest. That means it’s relatively not too far away anymore. With the release of the 40 Super cards, the value has improved for Nvidia already for the ending of the Ada series. But unless the cards were to spike in price in the next generation, we would expect the same of the new GPUs as well.

There are still plenty of viable choices in the market now. If there is a great graphics card you can pick up on sale that can achieve the performance you need from it then there’s not much reason to wait till the end of the year. Of course, if you can wait a new release is always exciting, and new features might be introduced.

As we saw with Ada, we got the addition of frame generation and the ability of DLSS 3 so there could be something ahead of us too. As Moore’s Law is Dead leaks supposedly that Nvidia will be focusing on efficiency in Blackwell and so if that is a focus for you, you may want to wait for that as well.