It is no secret now that Nvidia hates it when it comes to providing gamers with ample VRAM on their GPUs. The company's $400 RTX 4060 Ti was heavily criticized for launching with just 8GB memory. Later, Nvidia tried a greedy upsell tactic when it released the 16GB variant of the same but it cost an additional $100 or 25% more just for the extra buffer.
Meanwhile, the RTX 4060 on the other hand was also criticized since for some reason Nvidia thought it was a good idea to pack lesser memory capacity on a newer card since it came with 8GB while its predecessor, the RTX 3060 had 12.
A new report from Wccftech claims that Nvidia is going to be repeating the same thing with RTX 5060 too as the GPU is rumored to feature 8GB VRAM just like the 4060, and the xx60 cards from the company happen to be the most popular GPUs according to Steam's hardware survey.
Although there may be a bit of a silver lining this time as the report also adds that the 5060 Ti is going to have double the VRAM at 16 Gigs.
In comparison, Intel's new $250 Arc B580 comes with 12 GB VRAM and is overall faster than the RTX 4060. AMD also offers enough VRAM with its 12GB $350 7700 XT.
You can find the alleged specifications of the RTX 50 series (Blackwell) GPUs in the table below. We have also linked the relevant coverage wherever applicable:
| Model | GPU | CUDA Cores | Memory | Memory Interface | Memory Speed (Gbps) | Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) | Total Graphics Power (TGP) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 5090 | GB202-300 | 21760 | 32GB GDDR7 | 512-bit | 28 | 1792 | 600W |
| RTX 5080 | GB203-400 | 10752 | 16GB GDDR7 | 256-bit | 32 (?) | 1024 | 400W |
| RTX 5070 Ti | GB203-300 | 8960 | 16GB GDDR7 | 256-bit | 28 | 896 | 350W |
| RTX 5070 | GB205 | 6400 | 12GB GDDR7 | 192-bit | 28 | 672 | 250W |
| RTX 5060 Ti | GB206 (?) | 5120 (?) | 16GB GDDR7 | 128-bit | 28 (?) | 448 (?) | 200W |
| RTX 5060 | GB206 (?) | 4096 (?) | 8GB GDDR7 | 128-bit | 24 (?) | 384 (?) | 150W |
If you are wondering why it matters, in the recently released Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, 8GB graphics cards like the RTX 4060 were found to be struggling even at its intended resolution of 1080p (via ComputerBase). Game assets like textures, decals, and ray-traced effects love memory and this is why modern games, especially, demand plenty of it.
It is noteworthy here that the VRAM consumption of AMD, Nvidia, and Intel are all different with Nvidia being the most efficient in terms of delta color compression technology such that it requires the least amount of VRAM and bandwidth with Intel being the least efficient.
However, as we found in our RX 7800 XT vs RTX 4070 comparison, the AMD card often had much more memory headroom available despite Nvidia's superior technology.
Aside from the RTX 5060, Nvidia is also rumored to stick to 12 Gigs and 16 Gigs with the 5070 and 5080 respectively.
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