Edward Snowden slams Nvidia's RTX 50-series 'F-tier value,' whistleblows on lackluster VRAM capacity

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition card photos and unboxing
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

An infamous former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower has unexpectedly shared his opinion on the state of the graphics card market. Naturalized Russian citizen Edward Snowden has called the recently released Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 “a monopolistic crime against the consumer” due to its “crippling 16GB.” Imagine his ire if he was considering the upcoming RTX 50 laptop family...

You can see the full comments if you expand the tweet above. Snowden is brutally clear in sharing his disappointment with the RTX 50-series (Blackwell) family VRAM quotas. However, his opinion isn’t dissimilar to that of Tom’s Hardware GPU editor. In our review of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition earlier in the week, we also grumbled about the VRAM gap between the RTX 5090 (32GB) and the RTX 5080 (16GB, the same amount as the RTX 4080/S).

We also noticed that some modern games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, running 4K are already constrained by 16GB. So, we wrote that “24GB would have been far better for a $1,000 (or more) graphics card,” resulting in the RTX 5080 being an underwhelming second-tier offering from the new Blackwell series.

Things slide into even more desperate VRAM constraints lower the RTX 50-series GPU stack. In contrast, the RTX 5070 Ti with 16GB GDDR7 on a 256-bit bus (basically the same memory config as the RTX 5080) might find some favor among consumers; the ‘70’ card this generation comes packing 12GB VRAM, just like last gen. Thus, it isn’t surprising that Snowden also called out the RTX 5070, asserting that it “should have had 16GB VRAM minimum.”

It is easy to agree with the criticism of the Green Team’s stingy VRAM specifications for its new Blackwell series of consumer graphics cards. In February 2021, the chipmaker launched the popular RTX 3060 with 12GB as standard and lowered the RTX 3050 to 8GB. The consumer Blackwell series offering the RTX 5070 with 12GB and its expected RTX 5060 SKUs with as little as 8GB seems retrograde in 2025. As mentioned in the intro, laptop buyers are even less fortunate, particularly the RTX 5070 and 5060 laptop GPUs with 8GB VRAM, which appear to be hobbled at birth in the VRAM stakes.

AMD has yet to launch the Radeon RX 9700 XT, but leaked specifications have pegged the RDNA 4 GPU and the regular Radeon RX 9700 with 16GB of VRAM. Of course, the kind of performance the pair of RDNA 4 GPUs will bring remains to be seen. AMD's next-gen GPUs will reportedly hit the market in late March.

Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

  • hotaru251
    he aint wrong.

    Games want more vram as they go on (especially raytracing req. titles (indy game wants 12gb for 1440p)

    and if you use frame gen and all it uses more, but any background usage..it adds up.

    vram cost is chump change for an extra 8gb of the stuff compared to the profit they make off a single gpu.
    Reply
  • Hooda Thunkett
    While I agree with both the Tom's review and Snowden, honestly, the only reason I read the article was out of curiosity. I don't give his opinions more weight on the issue than I do, say, Miley Cyrus.
    I do idly wonder just why he should care. He shouldn't be able to legally get his hands on any modern RTX card.
    So, I guess what I'm saying is your clickbait actually worked this time. But don't keep doing that. I'll stop reading this site if it becomes "random celebrity not known for hardware expertise slams hardware manufacturer."
    Reply
  • usertests
    The performance will always be regarded as lackluster since 40/50 are using the same node. Nvidia can fix the VRAM for various cards by using 3 GB modules. 24 GB 5080 can happen on the same 256-bit bus.

    Maybe the worst thing coming is a 5060 Ti 8 GB.

    Hooda Thunkett said:
    While I agree with both the Tom's review and Snowden, honestly, the only reason I read the article was out of curiosity. I don't give his opinions more weight on the issue than I do, say, Miley Cyrus.
    I do idly wonder just why he should care. He shouldn't be able to legally get his hands on any modern RTX card.
    So, I guess what I'm saying is your clickbait actually worked this time. But don't keep doing that. I'll stop reading this site if it becomes "random celebrity not known for hardware expertise slams hardware manufacturer."
    Here's your Cool Story award 🏆
    Reply
  • adamXpeter
    Quite probably this is how AI sanctions hit the USA in the World Village.
    Reply
  • txfeinbergs
    Who cares what this tool thinks?
    Reply
  • Gururu
    If you want to see the actual comment go to his X (twitter) account, which is linked in the date in Toms article.
    Reply
  • coolitic
    The real reason that Nvidia constrains the VRAM capacity, despite it being such an unpopular position and not increasing prices that much (relatively-speaking), is because they want to segment the consumer and professional markets.

    The main two things differentiating Quadro and GeForce in most applications is VRAM capacity and power/thermal-design. And they ofc like to sell Quadro cards at an even more ridiculous price than their top-end GeForce cards.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    usertests said:
    Maybe the worst thing coming is a 5060 Ti 8 GB.
    already assume that...the base 5070 is coming with 12.

    so the 5060 ti will likely have 12 and base 5060 8gb.

    Nvidia straight up stopped making the 60 tier gpu a good buy way back with the 30 series.
    Reply
  • Gaidax
    16GB VRAM is probably the most cringe thing about 5080. I understand why, but as a consumer that understanding does not help.

    Of all the GPUs out there outside the xx90s, 5080 could have used 24GB the most.
    Reply
  • Varsaggo
    hotaru251 said:
    he aint wrong.

    Games want more vram as they go on (especially raytracing req. titles (indy game wants 12gb for 1440p)

    and if you use frame gen and all it uses more, but any background usage..it adds up.

    vram cost is chump change for an extra 8gb of the stuff compared to the profit they make off a single gpu.
    Yeah I been running through debugging the new Spiderman 2 on PC that loves to crash more than run and found that the game is constantly looking for about 31GB+ of VRAM in the back round at only 1080p high settings lol.
    At least I found that every single crash dmp that I have and ppl sent me have all said the same reason for failing back to desktop.... The games .exe is constantly trying to to release a resource that didn't belong to it. I'm assuming that it does belong to it but they didn't code it to grab the proper permissions from the is and is 95% of the crash issues. I'm shocked they haven't been able to find out what resource is being not given the proper permissions and fix it fairly quickly since 34 crash dmps I have gone through all have the same crash 😂
    But yes as u were saying games are constantly wanting as much VRAM nowadays and the 5080 is a slap in the face to the consumer
    Reply