Nvidia's next hardware launch for us gamers could be an RTX 5050 with a whopping 1 GB of extra VRAM

Ah, early 2025, those were the days. The RTX 50-series had just been announced and there was already talk about future Super models potentially sporting fancy collections of 3 GB VRAM modules. Now, in early 2026, there's little sign or hope for the 50-series Super cards—thanks AI. It looks like those 3 GB modules might only be packed into *drumroll* RTX 5050 cards.

According to hardware leaker MegaSizeGpu, and corroborated by Benchlife, the RTX 5050 will level up to GDDR7 memory later this year, and that'll be a whole 9 GB of it, thanks to those aforementioned 3 GB modules. Benchlife points out this is likely due to low supply of GDDR6.

MegaSizeGpu doesn't seem to impressed by this, pointing out Nvidia "knows they can give you a 5050/5060 128-bit 12 G with the new 3 G GDDR7 dies. But no, you got a 5050 9 G ????."

It's true that by using 3 GB modules, Nvidia could instead opt for 12 GB of VRAM by having four of those modules. It could have even done that without having to clamshell the chips, as the the standard RTX 5050 also has four VRAM modules, but these are 2 GB GDDR6 ones, totalling 8 GB.

According to the leaker, the new version will also have its bus width reduced to 96-bit. However, GDDR7 can be much quicker than GDDR6, which can more than offset that narrower bus.

And to be honest, who needs to rock 12 GB of RAM on an RTX 5050? At least as far as gaming is concerned, that amount of VRAM wouldn't amount to huge gains at 1080p, and that's all the RTX 5050 is really good for when it comes to modern, VRAM-intensive games. Not worth any added cost, anyways.

9 GB of VRAM, however, could be a slight boost for the lower end of the market, which is where plenty of people will be looking to buy right now, given RAMpocalypse-induced sky-high pricing. Provided it ends up costing the same as the OG RTX 5050. The 5050 is primarily a card for OEMs, anyway, so it's unlikely we'll see the actual pricing with our own retinas.

Whatever it costs and however much benefit the extra GB of VRAM provides, it's far from the 18 GB RTX 5070 Super or 24 GB RTX 5070 Ti Super we were hoping for. And to think, back then we were even hopeful for these Super cards to be priced similar to the launch prices of the regular RTX 50-series cards, with the latter taking a price cut.

Really puts it into perspective, eh? Now, we're lucky to find a single AIB model of these year-old cards at its original MSRP.

Benchlife says AIB card vendors, as far as it's aware, haven't received any updates about Super cards, and according to Chrome's machine translation, therefore concludes that "the possibility of it appearing at Computex 2026 is close zero." I can't say that's surprising.