It shouldn’t be long now until Nvidia unveils the official RTX 5090 specs. In the meantime, though, leaks claiming to spoil Team Green’s reveal are increasing by the day and not all of them bring good news. As the rumour mill currently stands, it looks as though RTX 5090 VRAM capacity won’t be quite as big a bump as we expected compared to RTX 4090.
For the past three generations, Nvidia’s best graphics cards have topped out at 24GB of memory. Now, with RTX 4090, even bandwidth has come to a standstill, as the card operates at the same 1,008GB/s as its predecessor, RTX 3090. Recent reports of a more dense memory module cluster for GB202, the presumed Blackwell GPU die at the heart of RTX 5090, naturally suggested an increase and ignited hopes of a 32GB GDDR7 monster. Sadly, though, the GeForce RTX 50 series flagship is more modest than monstrous according to leaks.
According to panzerlied (via Videocardz), a leaker who previously shared details about GB202’s memory module configuration, RTX 5090 will use a 448-bit memory bus. Prior to now, we expected the graphics card to sport a 512-bit bus. This implies that RTX 5090 won’t use all 16 memory modules supported by GB202, instead dropping to 14 (as each module uses 32-bits of the bus).
If true, this leaves RTX 5090 with just 28GB of VRAM. Unfortunate as it seems that we won’t see such a massive increase in capacity, the speed of GDDR7 and the card’s memory clocks should lead to dramatically improved bandwidth compared to RTX 4090. More specifically, we could be looking at a still-impressive 50% uplift, rising from 1,008GB/s to a whopping 1,568GB/s, based on previously leaked memory speeds. That’s 1.5TB a second.
We suspect Nvidia will give its official word on RTX 5090 at Computex 2024, so stay tuned for coverage live from the keynote as details emerge. In the meantime, check out other recent rumours on the card’s specs, including why its GPU may be two-in-one as well as claims of a trimmed down Founders Edition cooler.
If you’re after more concrete data, give our GeForce RTX 4080 Super review a read for our most up to date benchmarks, including frame rate figures for RTX 4090 and other high-end graphics cards.
