Nvidia probably doesn't care about gamers as RTX 5080 allegedly has just 16 GB VRAM

While Nvidia is praised for all the advancements it makes in terms of ray tracing performance and AI upscaling improvements, the company has faced criticism for the amount of VRAM or the lack thereof in its recent GeForce gaming GPUs.

In traditional games, textures and decals are typically the game assets that demand the most VRAM. However, in more recent titles, modern features such as ray tracing or frame generation / interpolation also gobble up a decent amount of video memory.

For example, in the current 40-series Ada Lovelace GPUs, the RTX 4060 has just 8 GB of VRAM and is actually less than what the preceding RTX 3060 had. The 4060 Ti also launched with 8 GB but the company later released another variant with 16 Gigs of memory that is only worth buying if you hate your money.

Likewise, the RTX 4070 also had too little VRAM which we touched on in detail in our AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT review. Even the 4070 Super had the same amount of VRAM at 12 GB despite being much improved in other areas.

Meanwhile, the VRAM capacities on the RTX 4080 (Super), and 4090 weren"t chided as much as 16 GB and 24 GB respectively were sufficient.

However, it looks like Nvidia may be about to make the same mistake again and this time with the RTX 5080 as the upcoming Blackwell GPU is rumoured to feature just 16 GB of VRAM. The report comes courtesy of X user kopite7kimi who has generally proved to be a reliable leakster in the past.

Apparently, the RTX 5080 has only 16 GB across its 256-bit wide memory bus which will complement 10,752 CUDA cores on the GPU. While 16 Gigs was sufficient for an x80 tier card in the past, it is probably not a stretch to say that the same capacity on a succeeding product is not a good option for gamers or video/3D artists who may potentially be looking to upgrade from a 4080 or even a 4070.

The leaker had also previously claimed that the 5080 would have a TGP (total graphics power) of 400 watts, which is 200 watts lower than the alleged 5090"s.

Similarly, the leaker has also published the alleged specs of the RTX 5090:

The 32 GB VRAM of the purported RTX 5090 is in line with Neowin"s previous speculation which based on the rumor that the GPU will feature a 512-bit bus.