Nvidia says it's sold twice as many RTX 50-series cards as RTX 40-series in the first 5 weeks. I'd bloody well hope so given there was essentially just the RTX 4090 for competition

Nvidia RTX 50-series graphics cards alongside an RTX 4090

(Image credit: Future)

Some dude with a mighty 'tache once said, "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics." The latter is what we've been presented with by Nvidia and its claims of doubling the sales of its RTX Blackwell cards over its previous generation cards in the same time frame certainly look good on paper, but absolutely deserve a little more contextualising.

Essentially, what Nvidia wants you to know is that in the first five weeks of the new RTX 50-series launch it outsold the RTX 40-series 2:1 in the same time period. The Ada generation of graphics cards was relatively positively received, despite understandable consternation over pricing and position of the $1,200 RTX 4080 and the subsequently unalived RTX 4080 12 GB. So, that looks good, no?

But we should be looking at the number of cards actually released in those relative time periods. With the new RTX Blackwell generation, Nvidia launched the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 on January 30 this year, with the higher volume RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 launching on February 20 and March 5 respectively. That's four discrete cards launching in five weeks and pretty much each of them sold out in minutes.

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Even as stock vanished sometimes before we even saw cards listed, that should equate to a fair number of sales, especially as the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 were lower priced and should have had larger volumes of cards in the channel.

The RTX 40-series, on the other hand, only had two separate GPUs launching in those first five weeks. The RTX 4090 launched on October 12 way back in 2022, when my beard was less grey and belly less protrusive, and then five weeks later the RTX 4080 was released.

Nvidia graph showing the relative sales of the RTX 40-series vs. RTX 50-series in the first five weeks — (Image credit: Nvidia)

That means, in comparison, there was just the low volume, $1,600 RTX 4090 on sale for the majority of that five week time period, and maybe we're including the launch day numbers of the $1,200 RTX 4080 to be generous.

You could almost then rewrite that statistic to read: Nvidia sold twice as many RTX 50-series cards as the RTX 4090 in the first five weeks of sales. Though that doesn't really sound quite so impressive, does it?

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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.