Almost a year talking about the rumors surrounding the NVIDIA RTX 40 graphics cards, direct successors of the current RTX 30 and now, just now, new rumors arrive that make us think that we were wrong. And it is more than likely that those of Huang will end up changing the nomenclature of their graphics cards towards RTX 50, leaving on paper a name that seemed plausible and partly following the jump produced from the GTX to the RTX. Therefore, the supposed RTX 5090 would be a beast according to what has been leaked.
Not that there are really going to be surprises in the performance of the RTX 4090/ RTX 5090 (it is difficult to give veracity to the rumors of change of nomenclature, but they are not implausible as such) since the filtering is not that it reveals relevant information not seen, but it focuses much more on the objective of the lens with which we see the graphics cards of new batch.
The increase in the count of the SM as well as the Shaders will go to a series of PCBs with some very interesting characteristics, starting with the highest-end graphics card from NVIDIA, which will consume nothing less than 600 watts.
NVIDIA RTX 4090 / RTX 5090, two PCB versions and a single chip
Previous rumors certified up to three different PCBs that would encompass a launch of three graphics cards, where now a small change could give NVIDIA much more output. What was revealed affirms that the company’s supposed highest-end graphics card with the name RTX xx90 (it was curious that the complete nomenclature was not given) will have two possible PCB configurations: a PG137 and a PG139 that are focused on a single SKU- 330, which clashes head-on with what we saw two weeks ago.
**90 PG137/139-SKU330, AD102-300, 24G 21Gbps, 600W
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) April 11, 2022
The leak would leave the RTX 4080 / RTX 5080 with the same SKU330 (at least in theory) and therefore NVIDIA would unify the criteria in this aspect by setting a clear guideline of only modifying the number of VRAM chips to thereby go from 24GB to 20GB.
In other words, there would be two different PCBs and possibly a repeat of the RTX 30 game where one of them was the NVIDIA designed PCB and the other the manufacturer reference PCB. But why then would NVIDIA change the name of its GPUs from RTX 40 to RTX 50 if there are no substantial changes to the chips, PCB or features?
RTX 50 and the bad omen of number 4
What is rumored and running like wildfire is precisely that NVIDIA wants to avoid the number 4 in its reference products. Why would you want to do this? Apparently 4 in China is associated with death and it seems that those of Huang have become superstitious, but this collides head-on with what was experienced more than a decade ago with the GTX 480.
Well, not that this series was a sweet moment for the greens, and since the Chinese market is gaining strength, NVIDIA may want to make this change leaving that bad luck behind.
The other theory is the evolutionary leap that they will take with the new graphics, which would leave room to leave one generation in the forefront and go directly to the next in the purest style of traditional marketing and incidentally, they approach AMD with their RX series 7000 in this aspect.
Perhaps both theories may be true, although it is more than likely that we will never know the true reasons if, indeed, NVIDIA ends up calling its Ada Lovelace gaming GPUs the RTX 50.