Nvidia RTX 5050 was missing in action at CES 2025 – but the budget GPU might just have been spotted in a surprising laptop

LG Gram marketing materials show the laptop with an RTX 5050 GPU
The rest of the promo blurb indicates an RTX 4050 graphics card, though
This suggests Nvidia delayed the RTX 5050, but it’s likely not that far off

Nvidia revealed its new Blackwell laptop GPUs alongside RTX 5000 desktop graphics cards recently at CES 2025, but we’ve just got a sighting of the lowest-tier mobile card that wasn’t aired at the show.

You may recall that past rumors claimed Nvidia might unveil the full suite of RTX 5000 laptop GPUs at CES, from the RTX 5050 up to the RTX 5090, but we only got RTX 5070 models and upwards – the RTX 5060 and 5050 weren’t anywhere to be seen.

However, in the latter case, promotional material for the LG Gram for 2025 shows the laptop equipped with an RTX 5050 GPU – while the provided specs refer to an RTX 4050 model, confusingly.

RTX 5050 MobileGDDR6 8GBhttps://t.co/SRN6mOgOCG pic.twitter.com/l2QtRtB7uJJanuary 13, 2025

As discovered by BullsLab Jay on X – check out the above post – we see the RTX 5050, except with the accompanying details showing a GPU with the Lovelace architecture (RTX 4000) and GDDR6 VRAM.

What could have happened theoretically – add plenty of seasoning – is that LG was planning on the RTX 5050 for the launch of this notebook, but Nvidia delayed the GPU. So LG switched to the RTX 4050 instead, but someone made a mistake and left the RTX 5050 name in, by the look of things.

LG Gram Pro 16 OLED

(Image credit: Valerio Porcu)

Analysis: A delayed Nvidia RTX 5050?

This theory seems plausible enough given that we heard more than one piece of chatter from the grapevine that Nvidia would be showing off the RTX 5050 to 5090 mobile GPUs at CES 2024. Which would also mirror what happened at the Lovelace notebook launch, where the RTX 4050 and upwards were all revealed.

The upshot is that it seems likely the RTX 5050 will get an airing in the future, the question being: how long will we have to wait? To an extent, that’s anyone’s guess, but if this purported GPU was indeed sidelined late in the game by Nvidia, just before CES 2025, there must be a good reason for that. So, don’t expect to see the RTX 5050 soon, but I’d be surprised if we have to wait all that long for this mobile graphics card to turn up.

Away from LG’s Gram notebook, the RTX 5050 (and RTX 5060) will enable cheaper gaming laptops to be pepped up with next-generation GPUs, and that includes the use of DLSS 4, which will help to speed up frame rates for on-the-go gaming.

In theory, the RTX 5050 will run with 8GB of VRAM, which would be a solid allocation for this level of GPU – considering it’ll match not just the RTX 5060 (in theory), but also the RTX 5070, which we know has controversially stuck with 8GB of video RAM (perhaps the reason why the mobile side of Blackwell was a rather lowkey affair at the recent CES).

However, Nvidia does have neural shader tricks up its sleeve for textures which, just like DLSS 4, the company argues is going to make a huge difference to RTX 5000 graphics cards.

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