While the Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series cards that were announced this week at CES 2025 initially tempted us with their fairly reasonable price and frame-generating magic, they haven’t proven to be hits on the memory front. This is especially vital considering that AMD RX 9070 graphics cards will have 16GB of VRAM and will likely be cheaper than Nvidia’s 16GB cards.
However, if recently Error in MSI packaging (By Graphics card) I Gigabyte listing error (By Graphics card) is nothing to complain about, the milquetoast memory configurations in most of the 50-series cards – not terrible by any means, but nothing to write home about – may have only happened recently. Moreover, these “bugs” could indicate future RTX 5080 GDDR7 configurations.
This is Nvidia: “Blackwell is equipped with the world’s fastest memory – GDDR7 with speeds up to 30 Gb/s.” The RTX 5090, 5070 Ti, and 5070 have 28Gbps memory, while the RTX 5080 has 16GB of 30Gbps memory.
In a video that now appears to have been altered or shortened, MSI reportedly showed off the RTX 4080 Vanguard Launch Edition packaging, which included 24GB of GDDR7 RAM for the card – 8GB more than it actually had. Judging by the product page of this graphics card, it appears that MSI has tweaked this packaging to say 16GB of GDDR7 memory.
Gigabyte, in turn, is displaying its RTX 4080 cards specs that show a 32Gb/s memory clock. This is 2 Gb/s faster than Nvidia’s declared card memory speed.
So what’s the fuss about? Well, according to Videocardz, Nvidia delivered the final BIOS version to partners with a delay, which led to the postponement of the launch to January 30. This could mean that AIB partners were working with archaic information and Nvidia had originally planned a different memory configuration.
Please note that the GDDR7 memory should have a capacity of 24 GB and a speed of 32 Gb/s available from Micron at some point, so this particular configuration – combining MSI and Gigabyte “bugs” – makes sense. This memory will exploit 3GB modules for a total of 24GB, with a presumed 256-bit bus width (8 3GB modules, each 32-bit wide).
If this memory capacity and speed was initially planned but then scrapped – perhaps to keep prices lower or because the memory hasn’t yet gone into mass production – it could possibly come to the table in the future as part of a super refresh of the 50 Series.
And if 3GB of GDDR7 memory does indeed get used, that could mean not just an RTX 5080 Super with 24GB VRAM, but perhaps even a refreshed lower-end card with 18GB VRAM. Perhaps an 18GB RTX 5070 Super. All speculation, of course, but nothing beyond the realm of possibility.
