The Gaming Hardware Launches That Shaped 2025: RTX 50-Series, Radeon RX 9070, Switch 2 and ROG Xbox Ally
A recap of the 2025 hardware launches that still define gaming PCs and consoles: new GPUs, the Switch 2, X3D processors and Windows handhelds.
A recap of the 2025 hardware launches that still define gaming PCs and consoles: new GPUs, the Switch 2, X3D processors and Windows handhelds.
Photo by PantheraLeo1359531 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0
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2025 brought one of the busiest years of gaming hardware launches in a long time. Most of those products are still the core of what people buy today. Here’s a recap of the launches that mattered and what they changed.
NVIDIA RTX 50-series
NVIDIA launched its RTX 50-series graphics cards in early 2025, starting with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080, followed by the 5070 Ti, 5070, 5060 Ti and 5060. The headline feature was DLSS 4 with multi-frame generation, which generates several frames for each rendered one in supported games. The generation also moved to GDDR7 memory.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 series
AMD’s AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 arrived in March 2025 with the RDNA 4 architecture, improved ray tracing and FSR 4, AMD’s first machine-learning upscaler. AMD focused on the mid-range rather than competing with NVIDIA’s flagship, and followed up with the RX 9060 XT.
Nintendo Switch 2
The Nintendo Switch 2 launched in June 2025 with a larger screen, more powerful hardware, magnetic Joy-Con 2 controllers that can work like a mouse, and GameChat. It also introduced the requirement for microSD Express cards for game storage.
AMD X3D processors
The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, launched in late 2024, became the go-to gaming CPU through 2025, and AMD added the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 12-core 9900X3D for gamers who also need productivity performance.
Windows handhelds with an Xbox experience
ASUS and Microsoft released the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X and the ROG Xbox Ally in October 2025. They run Windows with a full-screen Xbox experience designed for handheld use, which made Windows handhelds feel more like consoles.
What it means today
For buyers now, these launches are the baseline: DLSS 4 and FSR 4 upscaling, 16GB of VRAM as the safe amount for mid-range GPUs, AM5 as a long-lived CPU platform, and a choice between SteamOS and Windows on handhelds.
Bottom line
Most of the current buying advice on GamingScrims traces back to these 2025 launches. Check our buying guides for how they compare today.
Our picks: Graphics cards & Game credit & memberships
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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
16GB card that handles high-refresh 1440p and entry 4K.
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Illustrative photos: Photo by Timothy Borkowski / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0; Photo by Bryan Ochalla / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0; Photo by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) / Wikimedia Commons / Attribution