We may be waiting longer than normal for Nvidia’s next-generation RTX graphics cards.
Nvidia today released an updated roadmap for its GPU architectures during a briefing on the H100 GPUs. According to Tom’s Hardware, the presentation confirmed that the company is working on a successor to the Ada Lovelace architecture, which currently powers the RTX 4000 series.
However, the presentation shows that Nvidia’s next-generation architecture won’t arrive until 2025, which was also reported by the German publication HardwareLUXX.
That’s significant because the company usually launches a new consumer GPU family every two years. So the next-gen RTX cards—likely dubbed the 5000 series—were expected to arrive in fall 2024.
The new roadmap from Nvidia signals the company will prolong the RTX release cadence, at least for this round. It’s not hard to imagine why. The company’s latest graphics cards, the RTX 4000 series, have seen relatively weak sales, with supplies plentiful at retailers.
That’s a huge change from over two years ago when Nvidia experienced insane demand during the COVID-19 pandemic from both eager consumers and cryptocurrency miners. But since then, the market for graphics cards has cooled while GPU-based mining has essentially gone bust. The ensuing drop in demand was so big that Nvidia faced a product oversupply situation last year.
Although the successor to Ada Lovelace won’t arrive until 2025, the company already has its hands full with its other major market in enterprise GPUs. Nvidia’s roadmap shows the company is focused on releasing a new architecture next year meant to succeed Hopper, the technology powering Nvidia GPUs focused on generative AI. The demand for AI is so high that Nvidia is forecasting it’ll make $11 billion in revenue in the next quarter, up about 80% from the year before.