The global component shortage is apparently affecting Nvidia — one of the catalysts of this very crisis — just as hard as other manufacturers, with the consumer segment taking the hit. Memory and chip constraints are leading the company to think of interesting new products — a new RTX 5050 with 9GB of VRAM seems to be in the works, according to leaker @Zed__Wang.

According to the tweet, this new RTX 5050 will adopt 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory chips in favor of the existing 20 Gbps GDDR6 modules. The VRAM capacity will be upped from 8GB to 9GB, but the bus width will be cut down from 128-bit to just 96-bit. The current spec translates to 320 GB/s of bandwidth, and the updated spec will result in 336 GB/s bandwidth, which is a 5% increase.

The leaker goes on to mention that Nvidia could build 12GB variants of the RTX 5050 and 5060 with 3GB GDDR7 chips, but perhaps the company isn't concerned with value maximization like that, especially not in these times. The last time a desktop GPU from Nvidia rocked a 96-bit interface was back in 2024 with the RTX 3050, so it's actually not too distant of a memory.

The rest of the specs should remain identical; the same GB207 die with 2,560 CUDA cores, built on TSMC's 5nm process, rated at 130W. Clock speed differences (if any) will become public knowledge as we near the potential release of this SKU. The RTX 5050 is one of the few GPUs that basically saw no price hikes in the past few months, only going up about $10. The only other card with the same stability was the RTX 5060.

By: DocMemory
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