A rumor about the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 has just dropped, and if it’s true, it’s not good news for the longevity of this future budget gaming GPU. This particular leak concerns the VRAM fitted to the new graphics card, and unless Nvidia prices this new GPU really competitively, the RTX 5060 could be in some trouble.
It’s been a struggle to recommend the best graphics card under $300 lately, with the 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 being overpriced at $299, and the $269 8GB AMD Radeon RX 7600 struggling with ray tracing. It’s an area where Intel has attempted to carve a niche for itself, with the $249 Intel Arc B580 specs offering 12GB of VRAM and faster performance than the RTX 4060. That situation is further complicated by a severe lack of supply of the new Intel GPUs right now, however.
Sadly, though, it looks as though Nvidia is going to stick with the same amount of VRAM on the RTX 5060 as the 4060. This latest leak from tech site Wccftech claims the site has received some early details from its unnamed sources about the memory used on the new lineup of Nvidia RTX 5000 cards. If this leak is correct, then the GeForce RTX 5060 has 8GB of VRAM attached to a 128-bit interface, just like the RTX 4060 before it.
There’s a little ray of sunshine here, though, which is that the VRAM is at least rumored to be GDDR7, rather than the GDDR6 memory used on the RTX 4060, and it’s rumored to run at 28Gbps, giving it a total bandwidth of 448GB/s. Comparatively, the RTX 4060’s memory bandwidth is only 272GB/s, as a result of its slower VRAM. The problem here, though, is capacity. For a lot of games, 8GB is still enough to max out the settings at 1080p, but some of the latest games are already demanding more VRAM.
As a case in point, the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle system requirements need at least a 12GB RTX 4070 to meet the 1080p system requirements with full ray tracing, with the 8GB RTX 4000 cards listed nowhere in the full ray tracing tiers.
Meanwhile, recent benchmarks by tech site Computer Base show that the 12GB Radeon RX 6700 XT significantly outperforms the RTX 3080 in this game, not because it has a more powerful GPU, but because it has more VRAM at its disposal.
I’ve found this in my own testing too, In my Intel Arc A770 review I found that this 16GB card was over three times the speed of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti in my Doom Eternal ray tracing benchmark. That’s because performance at these settings crashes on 8GB cards, as they don’t have enough memory capacity to keep the GPU fed with data, while 12GB and 16GB cards pull ahead. Doom Eternal came out over four years ago, with ray tracing added in 2021 – this isn’t a new game.
Of course, this is all based on leaks right now, and Nvidia hasn’t officially confirmed any details about the RTX 5060, or even if this GPU actually exists. However, if this rumor is true, and Nvidia really is kitting out the card with 8GB of VRAM as standard, then it’s going to start struggling with some future games with demanding system requirements.
One potential ray of hope is that Samsung has already announced that it can make 3Gb GDDR7 VRAM chips, as well as 2Gb chips, inspiring rumors about a 24GB RTX 5080. Using these chips, Nvidia could potentially kit out a 12GB RTX 5060 using the same 128-bit interface as the 8GB card, and this 12GB card will be the one to buy if this happens.
In the meantime, check out our guide to the RTX 5090 to read up on all the leaks about the flagship Blackwell gaming GPU, which is rumored to be unveiled at CES 2025 in January, potentially with a massive 32GB of VRAM.