A new rumor suggests that NVIDIA could be expanding its plan to offer GPUs with 9 GB VRAM into its mid-performance tiers. With virtually no new consumer GPU offerings from any of the three manufacturers thus far in 2026, truly a first in decades, it appears that NVIDIA could be looking at VRAM compromises to launch some sort of refresh product line. By now, at over a year into the current RTX 50 series launch, we would’ve seen a more typical refresh launch with the “SUPER” series of GPUs, but despite some credible rumors leading up to CES that never happened, and at this point seems to be an ever-increasing never-type scenario. This, of course, is attributed to the ongoing DRAM/NAND shortage caused by the AI-boom development in progress, as orders by datacenters consume said chips.
Rumors from a month ago stated that Team Green is planning to reveal 9 GB versions of its Blackwell-based RTX 5050 at the upcoming Computex event in Taiwan. Furthermore, it was claimed that this newer RTX 5050 would utilize a cut-down version of the RTX 5060 GPU with the GDDR7 memory running on a 96-bit bus. Now, according to yet another rumor, NVIDIA is planning to do the same to its RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti GPUs.
NV preparing RTX 5060/5060 Ti 9GB variant
— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) April 14, 2026
– Using 24Gbit GDDR7 chip
– cut bus width 128-bit to 96-bit
– Lower total VRAM bw, expecting lower perf
– Even using 36Gbps speed, bw is lower than 8GB
– Expecting May-June launch (Computex?) https://t.co/Vmwhb7tkbI
Now, both rumors are coming from credible sources and appear to be hinting at a common theme; NVIDIA could be planning some kind of new product launch at Computex involving products with 9 GB GDDR7 running on a 96-bit bus. Dropping from 16 GB to 8 GB for those gaming at 1080p, and some 1440p, is not necessarily the end of the world, but the lower bus might present an issue; testing will be needed to see if this is true. If any of this does pan out to be true, the next big question will be pricing, as it’s highly debatable how much consumers are willing to pay for cards with less VRAM than previous models. It will also be interesting to see how AMD and Intel respond if NVIDIA offers GPUs with the aforementioned memory configurations.
Discussion (12 replies)
Join Discussion →Glas they revisited their texture compression to get more out of 8 gig cards. Like they did with the 970... right? ;)
One more gb of vram makes big difference?
Even with compression - how good is it? How fast?
9gb is such a bizarre amount
Truly none of this makes a whole lot of sense and rumors are really coming from every direction now. The only thing I can make out from them is that NV has something going on with the RTX 5060 GB206 die. Either a surplus of low-yield GPUs that they want to use for the 5050 models, and/or a shortage of hi-yield for the 5060s which are going to be repackaged with this memory configuration while the current gen gets phased out.
I guess, bottom line, if it works it works - more a 1080/1440 thing?
With their new texture compression who knows. But this means more.gaming cards at.16 gig and leave the big cards to others.
not even going to pos about itt but now another rumor that the 3060 12G could make a comeback. I swear . . . .mumble mumble . . . . .walks away in disgust.
Samsung begged them for that probably.
I guess it depends how well the texture compression is going to function - I dont doubt it works, but is it fast enough type stuff.
It is better to have 12gb I think than 8/9. I was reading NV is stating 80% compression. So functionally almost doubling the frame buffer? I suspect not everything can be compressed. are there compression for sound and things beyond textures as well?
Remember SoftRAM for Win95?
Compression is a misnomer unless it is specified whether it's lossy or lossless. Most "incredible" compression schemes are lossy. H.265/AV1? Lossy and look better only because a LOT of horsepower goes into reconstructing the image from the "hints" left by the encoder. They all depend on the fact that presented with incomplete information, our brains try to fill in the rest. So yes, almost any media can be compressed. But decompressing (or rather reconstructing) it will require serious compute power.
It runs on .wads