Since the official announcement of the specifications of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, many analysts have been puzzled. For such a high-end graphics card, it seemed to lack some punch when it came to VRAM with a mere 16GB, especially since that’s exactly what the 4080 delivered. A post from MSI has ignited speculation on a potential new RTX 5080 configuration.

MSI is one of the most prominent Nvidia board partners, and as such, you would expect its information to generally be accurate. MSI recently posted a promotional video that showed a GeForce RTX 5080 Vanguard box that had “24GB GDDR7 GeForce RTX 5080” written on the side. MSI has so far provided no explanation and the video is still available at the time of writing.

24GB has also been sighted on the MSI website

Though it was commonly believed to be a simple mistake with a misprint on a mock-up box, the mystery has since deepened. An eagle-eyed tech enthusiast on Reddit spotted a listing on the MSI website that appeared to contain the same mistake. When browsing the MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi motherboard, Reddit user Due-Bee-9574 spotted something curious when checking the graphics card compatibility list.

The list of compatible graphics cards contained an entry for an MSI Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 with a memory size of 24576 GDDR7 VRAM. Or 24GB in other words. This paticarly entry has since been changed on the MSI website back to 16GB, but it is curious that this mistake has been made twice in completely different places by the same company.

Typo or a hint at the future?

In the previous generation, Nvidia launched several ‘Super' variants of the RTX 40 series cards as a mid-generation refresh of the line. These refreshed GPUs had upgraded specifications and served to fill the gap between the winding down of the original RTX 40 line and the launch of the RTX 50 series. It would be odd to launch a ‘refresh' so close to the vanilla versions, however.

It could be that Nvidia has plans for a 24GB version of the RTX 5080 in the future, perhaps a Super or even a Ti version. However, it can be argued that a high-end card like the RTX 5080 should have been equipped with more VRAM from the start. Looking back to the last-gen Super cards, we saw the 4070 Ti jump from 12GB to 16GB with the 4070 Ti Super for the same $799 MSRP.

Nvidia's launch of the RTX 50 series has not gone well so far, with numerous disasters in manufacture and supply. With this in mind, Nvidia does need a plan to regain consumer confidence, maybe we are seeing the first signs of what it might be.

About the Author

Rebecca Hills-Duty

Writing and journalism experience at VRFocus, UploadVR, The Escapist, HTC, PC Gamer, Tech Radar+ and Dexerto. Can sometimes be found playing with retro tech.