Here’s how Nvidia’s CEO defends the RTX 5090’s $2,000 price tag

“When someone would like to have the best, they just go for the best,” said Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang in a Q&A session with media at CES 2025. Huang was speaking on the newly-announced RTX 5090, and its new price tag of $2,000, making it the most expensive desktop graphics card Nvidia has ever released.

It’s a new high for Nvidia, but also a bold departure from the rest of the range. The next card down in Nvidia’s stack, the RTX 5080, comes in at $1,000 — half the price of the flagship. Huang suggested that customers don’t want to deal in micro-segmentation minutia. “$2,000 is not small money, it’s fairly high value,” Huang said. “But a lot of customers, they just absolutely want the best.”

In the session, the decorated CEO covered everything from tariffs to AI scaling to gaming. A lot of focus was placed on Nvidia’s new RTX 50-series GPUs, however, which Huang suggests is much more than just a new graphics card generation. “Without AI, and without the Tensor cores and all of the innovation around DLSS 4, these capabilities simply wouldn’t be possible.” Huang also hinted at possible GPUs lower down the stack, saying, “Is there a 60s? I don’t know. It is one of my favorite numbers, though,” hinting at a possible RTX 5060 in the future.

Although the $2,000 price of the RTX 5090 has grabbed headlines, Nvidia’s pricing lower down the stack is actually lower than the previous generation. The RTX 5080 matches the RTX 4080 Super at $1,000, while the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 are $50 less expensive than their last-gen counterparts, clocking in at $750 and $550, respectively.

Those are reasonable prices considering Nvidia says that its new range of graphics cards delivers two times the performance of the previous generation. That performance boost largely comes on the back of Nvidia’s new DLSS 4 tech, however. DLSS 4 includes upscaling and frame generation like previous versions, but exclusive to RTX 50-series GPUs, DLSS 4 introduces multi-frame generation. With it, cards like the RTX 5090 have access to 4X frame generation, where only one out of every four frames is rendered by the GPU.

It’s hard to say now if the RTX 5090 will truly be worth $2,000, but it certainly looks like a monster GPU. It won’t be long until we know for sure, with both the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 set to release on January 30.