A new affordable Nvidia gaming GPU is coming and it has potential to be pretty good

It has come to light that Nvidia plans to refresh the RTX 5050 with a new model featuring more VRAM. This revised RTX 5050 desktop GPU reportedly features 9 GB of VRAM, courtesy of 3 GB GDDR7 modules. We now have full specs of the card courtesy of Kopite7kimi on X, and the card can be a good option for some gamers.

The RTX 5050 9 GB is set to be based on the GB206 Blackwell GPU with 2,560 CUDA cores and a 130 W TDP. The upcoming desktop card reportedly features a 96-bit wide memory bus. Since we don’t know the final speed of the GDDR7 modules used in the new RTX 5050, we can’t ascertain the total memory bandwidth. However, due to the fast GDDR7, the RTX 5050 memory bandwidth is likely to be more than the 320 GB/s of the current RTX 5050 with 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM.

Now, since the RTX 5050 9 GB features the same CUDA core count and 130 W TDP as the RTX 5050 8 GB but with potentially a minor increase in bus width, we expect the gaming performance of the card to stay the same. However, where we do expect to see a measurable difference is in gaming smoothness and texture details in VRAM-heavy titles.

It has become quite clear by now that modern AAA titles are increasingly demanding more than 8 GB of VRAM to run smoothly at 1080p with higher graphics settings. While a mere 1 GB VRAM bump might not sound like much on paper, it can be the difference between a game that is a stuttery mess and a title that delivers a smooth gameplay experience.

Hardware Unboxed has demonstrated this quite extensively: 8 GB VRAM is not enough for modern AAA gaming. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, for instance, requires 9 GB of VRAM to run smoothly at 1080p/high. The same is true for Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, as the game needs more than 8 GB at 1080p/high.

The RTX 5050 with 9 GB of VRAM will play these games without sacrificing texture quality and stuttery performance. The RTX 5050 8 GB, on the other hand, is much likely to suffer from these issues.

So, the RTX 5050 9 GB could prove to be a pretty good card, depending on the final pricing. If Nvidia prices the card reasonably above the RTX 5050 and below the RTX 5060, it will make a lot of sense.

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