The dust hasn’t long settled on the launch of Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070, but rumours of a refresh are already abound. It seems that Team Green is planning to bring out ‘Super’ variants of each card which should deliver welcome bumps in key specs.
Chiphell forum user panzerlied claims that RTX 5080 Super and RTX 5070 Super are in the works. While finer details are few for the moment, they state that the cards will respectively boast 24GB and 18GB of GDDR7 VRAM. Curiously, though, panzerlied notes “but it doesn’t feel that fast.”
As a reminder, RTX 5080 boasts a 16GB buffer while RTX 5070 rocks 12GB of VRAM. The proposed increases would net the cards a respective boost of 50% in terms of capacity. In order to achieve this, Nvidia will need to swap out 2GB memory modules with more spacious, and expensive, 3GB alternatives.
Welcome as the boost is for RTX 5080, it’s the RTX 5070 that would be most transformed by an increase in memory capacity. In Damien’s RTX 5070 review, he rightly laments the existing 12GB buffer as it limits the card’s capabilities to run games at higher resolutions (namely 4K) alongside more demanding effects or textures.
Equipped with 18GB of VRAM, RTX 5070 Super would be more able to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 which already have that much capacity at their disposal. This is to say nothing of how more memory would ultimately improve the longevity of the card, as we’ve seen recently RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and 8GB.
Circling back to panzerlied’s comments on performance, the user may be highlighting that improvements outside of memory capacity may be minimal. There’s room for Nvidia to push RTX 5070 further by using GB205 dies with all 50 SMs. However, squeezing more out of RTX 5080 would require a jump from GB203 to GB202 bringing it closer to RTX 5090.
These are the first rumblings I’ve seen on potential Super variants of GeForce RTX 50 Series cards, so I imagine it’ll be many months before we get an official word from Nvidia. In the meantime, treat the above like all rumours – with a healthy pinch of salt.
The immediate future will see Nvidia focus on RTX 5060, which seems set for a launch just prior to Computex 2025. It shouldn’t hit the scene alone, though, as AMD is apparently preparing to release its Radeon RX 9060 XT around the same time, possibly just with 16GB of memory.
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