Thanks to a big step up in overall VRAM clock speed, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 will have a total memory bandwidth that’s actually higher than the RTX 4090, despite having a much narrower memory bus. That’s according to a new leak that suggests the addition of GDDR7 to the RTX 5080 will massively improve its memory throughput.
As what’s expected to be Nvidia‘s second best graphics card option when its new range of gaming GPUs launches next year, the RTX 5080 stands a good chance of outperforming the RTX 4090 anyway. This would fit with the long-standing trend of new Nvidia GPUs where the current generation x080 card beats the previous generation x090 card, but we wouldn’t necessarily have expected the RTX 5080 to outpace the RTX 4090 when it comes to memory bandwidth.
That’s because the RTX 4090 uses a very wide 384-bit memory bus, which means it literally has 384 connections from the GPU to the memory, while the RTX 5080 is expected to have a smaller 256-bit memory bus. However, a new leak hints that the RTX 5080 will be equipped with 32Gbps GDDR7 VRAM, which is over 52% faster than the 21Gbps GDDR6X VRAM used in the RTX 4090.
As a result of this, the RTX 5080 would have a total memory bandwidth (VRAM speed x memory bus width / 8) of 1,024GB/s compared to 1,008GB/s for the RTX 4090. This utterly pales in comparison to the expected RTX 5090 memory bandwidth, however, as that card is believed to have a 512-bit bus with GDDR7 memory running at 28Gbps, for a total bandwidth of 1,792GB/s.
This is all according to WCCFTech that cite “our sources” as providing details to the site of Nvidia’s upcoming opening keynote speech for CES 2025, the world’s largest tech trade show taking place in Las Vegas in early January 2025. Along with details of the RTX 5090 and RTX 5070, the claims include this intriguing detail about the RTX 5080.
Ultimately, memory bandwidth alone isn’t enough to determine overall gaming performance. Too little and you can be assured a graphics card will underperform, but the overall performance of the RTX 5080 will be an interplay of the number of processing cores in the GPU, the speed of the GPU and the speed of the memory.
You can learn more about everything we know so far to do with the RTX 5080 in our Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 guide, but if you’re looking for a bargain right now, you can check out our Amazon Prime Day deals page for some graphics card discounts.