Nvidia & AMD’s New GPUs Will Push VR on PC

Nvidia and AMD both announced their next generation PC graphics cards at CES 2025.

Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 50 series and AMD’s new Radeon RX 9070 series bring modest raw performance improvements alongside significantly enhanced neural upscaling, neural frame generation, and ray tracing capabilities.

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 Series

Nvidia announced the RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 PC graphics cards, the first consumer products to use its new Blackwell GPU architecture.

The RTX 50 series are the first consumer cards with GDDR7 VRAM, which offers 33% faster memory bandwidth compared to GDDR6X VRAM. Combined with the greater number of CUDA cores, this should result in 20-50% higher raw raster performance compared to the previous generation.

But raw raster performance isn’t Blackwell’s main focus. New architecture brings forth fourth-generation RT Cores, as well as fifth-generation Tensor Cores. Those RT Cores have a 2x ray triangle intersection rate for higher ray tracing performance, while the Tensor Cores enable the flagship feature of the new DLSS 4: Multi Frame Generation.

If you’re unfamiliar, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is Nvidia’s neural upscaling and frame generation technology. The GPU can render images at lower frame rates and resolutions, and then upscale them using artificial frames and machine learning. In the previous RTX 40 Series, single frame generation was introduced, enabling a doubled frame rate. This is similar to VR compositors’ Motion Smoothing and Application Spacewarp features. The new RTX series can now support up to three frames in between, which effectively quadruples frame rate. However, DLSS frame generation isn’t supported in any VR game that we’re aware of, and results in increased latency compared to VR-specific frame extrapolation techniques.

Nvidia says the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 will arrive on January 30, priced at $950 and $2000 respectively, while RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti will launch in February at $550 and $750.

AMD’s RX 9070 & RX 9070 XT

AMD has released far fewer details on its next generation cards, RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT.

The company says the RX 9070 cards are intended to offer affordable performance, competing with Nvidia’s RTX 5070 rather than its higher end product. It hasn’t revealed pricing or a release date beyond “Q1 2020”. Both cards have 16GB of GDDR6 based VRAM. Both cards feature AMD’s second generation AI accelerators, which are used to power FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 – AMD’s response to Nvidia DLSS 4. PC VR Moves Ahead

Although some PC VR users play graphically simple games like Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag on Quest at high resolutions and settings, others prefer to use PC VR for more realistic racing and flight simulators. Even the mighty RTX 4090 can’t run these VR experiences with optimal resolution and settings. As 4K per-eye PC VR headsets such as

or

will arrive by 2025 and join the market of 3K per-eye headsets, PC VR fans will need the graphics horsepower needed to take full advantage of this resolution. Nvidia will cater to this at the top end while AMD offers affordable competition to entice Quest users to build PCs and try SteamVR.

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