A quick summary of everything that went wrong. I thought I'll summarize it so we do not forget since there is so much of it and most of it is completely outrageous.
PS: I may update this list if new facts emerge
- RTX 5070 being presented as similar performance to RTX 4090 thanks to "AI". While this is obviously false in so many ways (FG and MFG introduces latency over native, also MFG 4x has much more artifacts over 2x not to mention over native, 5070 has only half the RAM of 4090)
- RTX 50 cards being artificially VRAM limited - i.e. compared to relative compute performance / VRAM vs. competition. This will no doubt become similarly crippling in the future as it is currently crippling to i.e. 3070 in certain games.
- 50 series presented as having 3x AI, 2x RT and 1.5x shader speedup relative to 40 series. But somehow none of this shows in the benchmarks. For example there seems to be no RT speedup relative to raster speedup in 5090 and 5080. While the consensus nowadays seems to be that Blackwell is basically the same architecture as Ada with just minor tweaks. And yet competitors were able to i.e. provide meaningful improvement in RT relative to raster despite facing similar node limitations as Nvidia.
- Also the naming scheme of what 5080, 5070Ti etc. are supposed to mean seems to be quite inflated relative to what it used to mean. 5080 being only small improvement over 4080Super. 5070Ti is basically 1:1 performance replacement for 4080.
- We were promised "great availability" yet the cards are nowhere to be found and it is by far the most paper launch of launches by Nvidia in history.
- MSRP prices are nowhere to be found either (as expected). But the 5070Ti launch was cause of yet another controversy as there is no FE version of the card and thus Nvidia sent Asus Prime cards to some reviewers as the "MSRP" variant. Yet Asus had this card listed with price 20% over MSRP. Thus depending on who you asked (Nvidia or Asus) the same card had completely different value proposition.
- RTX 40 series cards are also nowhere to be found. Creating artificial scarcity and driving prices of all Nvidia GPUs up. A scenario orchestrated by Nvidia either on purpose or by sheer incompetence (but judging by lessons from history, the former is more likely)
- Despite problems with melting 12VHPWR connectors & RTX 4090s, Nvidia didn't make any design improvements and is now using it for 5090s which for certain AIB variants can exceed 600W. While 4090 is a design downgrade from 3090Ti which had certain protections built-in so that you couldn't cut 5 out of 6 cables and keep the card still running. But this is completely possible on 40 and 50 series - i.e. delivering all the current via single cable until meltdown. It is now consensus of most electrical engineers that Nvidia's design is inexplicable as it leaves no safety margin thus even a slight deviation from ideal scenario can create meltdown or potential fire hazard scenario. Also the tactic of blaming customer for "improper" setup etc. is a completely inappropriate excuse. Even if the meltdowns were caused by some suboptimal handling by customer - it is quite certain it wouldn't have happened if the cards were using the standard PCIe cable connectors. While at the same time this could easily be caused by imperfections in connectors / cables and their respective manufacturing processes instead of just customer handling error.
- Nvidia enforces use of 12HPWR connectors even for their AIB partners for completely unknown reasons. While the competition keeps using PCIe connectors and doesn't seem to have any problems powering GPUs with comparable TDP to Nvidia cards.
- Blackwell has stability issues when PCIE 5.0 is enabled on certain (or maybe most?) motherboards. The problem could be farther exacerbated by early driver versions. Supposedly some cards have been bricked because of these problems, but usually it is enough to downgrade PCIE to 4.0 in motherboard BIOS. However this is a pretty big oversight and no explanation from Nvidia if this is hardware related or could be fixed by BIOS update etc. Also some PCIE extenders don't work even if you downgrade to 4.0 speed.
- In their flashy presentation Nvidia forgot to mention that support for 32bit PhysX on Blackwell is discontinued. Among affected games are titles like most of the games from Batman Arkham series, most from older Metro series etc. Now if you want to play these games on Blackwell GPUs you can either emulate it on CPU (while for 8core CPU you can expect around 40ish fps on your 5090) or you can buy separate older Nvidia GPU just for "PhysX". Isn't that nice and convenient? Yet no word from Nvidia of some emulation layer that could translate it to 64bit calls.
PS: I may update this list if new facts emerge
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