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

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.