NVIDIA officially announced the RTX 5070 alongside its other three 50-series GPUs last month, but what it hadn’t announced was an official launch date for the RTX 5070. Both the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 launched on January 30. During NVIDIA’s announcement at CES at the beginning of last month, those were the only two GPUs in the series that had launch dates.
Both GPUs promptly went up for sale at about 6AM Pacific Standard Time on the day, and were out of stock within minutes. Leaving gamers with a few choices. Wait for RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 restocks, wait for the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti, or just forego upgrading to a new GPU for the moment.
Some retailers have had restocks of the more powerful GPUs, but not for long thanks to scalpers. Other partners, like Zotac, are combatting scalpers by selling directly to consumers. Now that it’s almost mid-February, it seems the best option might be to wait for the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti. Especially if the latter GPU is the one you’re going for.
NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 launch date has been pushed to March
NVIDIA hasn’t put out any official statements announcing the launch dates of its next two cards. However, it has updated the webpage for those cards. Consumers now know when they can attempt to buy either one. The NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti will be launching on February 20. If this is the card you’re going for, then you have just one more week to wait. The card won’t be available directly through NVIDIA, however. Instead, it’ll be sold by add-in card partners and system integrators, NVIDIA says. The price starts at $749.
The RTX 5070 on the other hand, isn’t coming this month. It was initially announced as coming in February. However, NVIDIA now confirms that the RTX 5070 is launching on March 5 starting at $549. That’s only around two more weeks. So the extended wait isn’t long.
It also may give some consumers a chance to save any extra money they may need to buy the card. So the delay isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s worth keeping in mind that the March 5 date is only confirmed for the Founders Edition card. That being said, it is likely that cards from NVIDIA’s board partners will be launched on the same day. Some of them may have higher costs though.
The RTX 5070 Ti will not be getting a Founders Edition card
NVIDIA already confirmed this during its January 6 announcement, but it’s worth reiterating. The RTX 5070 Ti will not come in a Founders Edition. That’s precisely why the card will be sold by NVIDIA’s partners, and not by NVIDIA itself. Both the RTX 5070 and the RTX 5070 Ti will come with advanced DLLS 4 technology that supports multi-frame generation.
It’s this multi-frame tech that NVIDIA says allows the RTX 5070 to produce performance equal to an RTX 4090. Given the difficulty in acquiring an RTX 50-series GPU thus far, you’ll want to be prepared for sales to go live in the coming weeks.
