The RTX 50 series: should you wait until you get one to build a new PC? –

Whether you’re a PC builder or just a PC gaming enthusiast, you’re always waiting. In just a few months RAM prices are expected to drop. Oh, don’t buy now, there’s a shortage of this, or its prices are ridiculous, or – the most tempting reason to put off that upgrade of all – a new generation of graphics cards is coming out.

Nvidia has just unveiled the long-awaited 50-series graphics cards, and while they have lots of big numbers, if you’re not sure what all that means, and want to know if it’s worth waiting to fight the bots when pre-orders and sales go live, read on, because we’ll get into how these cards could affect your gaming performance.

As expected, Nvidia came out swinging with the 50-series. Although the 40- and 20-series were not as well received, it seems that the odd generations of cards are often the outstanding hits. The flagship model, the 5090, is not designed for your everyday gamer, but if you look at the specs, you’ll see how beastly it is. 21,760 CUDA cores clocked at 2.01 GHz with a boost clock of 2.41 GHz, a whopping 32 GB of GDDR7 memory and a 512-bit wide memory interface. Of course, you pay the price both literally and in power consumption for this $999 GPU, but it shows how far we’ve come in computing.

The 5080, 5070 Ti and 5070 will be much more interesting for someone who just wants to play games. As mentioned, we won’t go into the individual numbers for each card, but the prices are not as high as we feared. The $549 RTX 5070 will likely sell out as soon as it is released, but the price feels fairly acceptable, especially with the tagline that it offers 4090 performance levels.

How the 5070 can deliver such performance is largely due to AI, the technology Nvidia dipped its toe into with the 40 series and has now dipped in with both feet. The RTX 50 series introduces AI in shaders with RTX Neural Face, frame rate enhancement with DLSS 4 and even autonomous game characters created with AI. This all sounds very impressive, but is it something you want?

As of now, these cards will be in incredible demand, and it is unlikely you will find one for RRP, as you will likely have to go to other higher-priced manufacturers. The performance and AI features will bolster the 50 series to strong performance levels, but if you’re holding fire to upgrade until you can get your hands on one, you may just want to pull the trigger, because even though these cards have been unveiled and will even be in laptops in March and April, it may take much longer to get your hands on one for your next build.

There is also the fact that some, not all, of the features available in the 50-series will come to the 40-series in future updates. In the US, where expected tariffs could drive up the price of GPUs and other PC components, this may be the time to act. There is no perfect time to build a computer, but at the same time, this means that every day is the best day to build one. Of course, there have been increasingly bad times to make personal computers. We all remember how high prices were during COVID, but in an industry where there’s always something new, always the next big thing to wait for, it’s up to you when you decide to pull that trigger. If you want to wait for the 50 series, they look hugely impressive, but if you want to be as informed as possible, you’ll probably have to wait a while until people can come up with reviews, benchmarks and more. Nevertheless, a new GPU generation is exciting, and this could be one of the biggest breakthroughs we’ve seen in PC gaming.