Nvidia's RTX 5080 24GB Has Reportedly Been Cancelled Due To Cost Concerns

Published Nov 11, 2026, 8:22 AM EST Sam Woods is TheGamer’s Senior Reporter. He’s been in games journalism since 2020 and has undertaken a variety of roles in that time. These have included roles such as SEO Editor, Managing Editor at DualShockers, and Global Head of Gaming, and he's also been seen on the BBC. He was promoted to the Senior Reporter position in 2025 following a series of high-quality reports and exclusives for TheGamer. Since 2020, Sam has written over 3,000 articles and specializes in telling the stories of the people behind the games. He’s interviewed the biggest game directors, some of the industry’s top talents, told the stories of how indie games came to be, and spoken to players about what really makes them tick. He’s also interviewed some of the world’s biggest musical artists to find out how the medium has inspired their work, and TV and Film actors about their roles in video game adaptations. He even hosted a PAX panel in 2021 and made a documentary in 2024 surrounding the creation of a Disney game. Alongside this, Sam focuses on breaking news. He got the scoop on Perfect Dark’s cancellation, provided context on some AI drama, and revealed that Lady Dimitrescu’s actress would love to step back into the character’s giant shoes. These articles have been picked up by the biggest gaming sites, including IGN, GameSpot, and PC Gamer. He also loves to dive into the numbers behind the games. Sam’s journey in games journalism has taken him all over the world. He’s covered Gamescom in Germany, Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles, and Tokyo Game Show in Japan, each on three occasions. He’s been learning Japanese since 2024 with the intention of identifying and translating Japanese-language news and bringing it to English-language audiences first, something he’s done countless times. Sam’s first review was 2020’s Battletoads reboot, and he’s since reviewed games in The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario, and Pokemon franchises. AI is a problem for many reasons, one of which is its impact on RAM, other PC components, and the price of hardware. As AI companies like OpenAI buy up as much RAM as they can for their data centers, less is available for the rest of us, pushing prices higher and higher. It's textbook supply and demand, but while big companies can often stomach the price increases, consumers are left to suffer. We've seen it with almost every video game hardware manufacturer, and over the last couple of years, the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, ROG Ally, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series have all seen price hikes due to global shortages and higher wholesale prices. Things have gotten so bad that Nvidia seems to have shot itself in the foot, as reports have suggested it has had to cancel the upgraded RTX 5080 24GB graphics card because it's not cost-efficient to manufacture and distribute it. Nvidia's RTX 5080 24GB Graphics Card Reportedly Won't Enter Production Because The VRAM Is Too Expensive The current RTX 5080 has 16GB of VRAM, and Nvidia was planning to release a more powerful version containing 24GB. This would have helped future-proof the graphics card as games become more graphically demanding. It has now, reportedly, been canceled. The report comes from VideoCardz, which says the 5080 24GB was set to become China's flagship graphics card. However, news circulating on Chinese message boards has suggested this has been canned due to the cost of GDDR7 chips. The current 16GB model uses eight 2GB GDDR7 chips; the proposed 24GB model would have used eight 3GB GDDR7 chips. The problem is that the 3GB chips cost roughly three times as much as their 2GB counterparts, and therefore, producing this new version of the RTX 5080 would have been completely impossible from an economic standpoint. VideoCardz linked the issue to delays impacting the GeForce RTX 5080 Super. It has been reported that Nvidia will "continue supplying GPUs paired with 2GB GDDR7 memory chips," allowing production partners to continue making the original 16GB model. Now, neither the RTX 5080 24GB nor its cancellation has been officially confirmed by Nvidia; however, there is no smoke without fire, and VideoCardz was confident enough to report on the situation. It seems entirely plausible given the current cost of hardware components. It's just worth taking with a grain of salt. I guess that, given their disdain towards their customers and the entire human race, Nvidia not being able to make more money from consumers isn't necessarily a bad thing. Date Founded April 1, 1993 CEO Jensen Huang Subsidiaries Mellanox Technologies, Cumulus Networks, NVIDIA Advanced Rendering Center Headquarters Santa Clara, California, United States