AI may have just killed your dreams of an Nvidia RTX 5000 Super series, according to a new rumor

In what would be an unprecedented shock move, Nvidia could be cancelling its upcoming RTX 5000 Super series of graphics cards, according to a new rumor. That would mean potential cards, such as the RTX 5080 Super and RTX 5070 Super, won't arrive soon or perhaps ever, potentially dashing the hopes of many gamers who had been holding out for these upgrades.

The Super refresh of Nvidia GPUs has been a regular occurrence for the last few generations of the company's graphics cards, with the RTX 2000, 3000, and 4000 series all launching with an initial lineup, then being followed up by a Super series a year or so later. The RTX 5000 Super series had been particularly anticipated, as it was expected to resolve one of the most complained-about issues with the current generation of cards, which is a lack of VRAM. However, it's now claimed that this very VRAM upgrade could cause the next Super series to be delayed or cancelled.

Specifically, many of the rumored RTX 5000 Super series specs suggested Nvidia would be moving from using 2Gb GDDR7 VRAM chips to 3Gb ones, enabling the company to simply swap out the chips and boost VRAM by 50%. So, for instance, in the case of the RTX 5070, it has 12GB of VRAM currently (a limitation we found held it back in some game tests in our RTX 5070 review), but the rumored RTX 5070 Super would see it have 18GB. Meanwhile, the RTX 5080 would move from 16GB to 24GB for its Super variant.

However, according to a post from regular tech leaker 'Uniko's Hardware' on X (formerly Twitter), these 3Gb chips are suffering from a "crazy shortage" that means they won't be available in sufficient numbers for desktop graphics cards, and "thus the super series is cancelled."

What's more, Uniko's Hardware goes on to say "the current models are expected to be more expensive very soon, because of the increasing cost of 2gb gddr7." Yes, not only could the Super series be cancelled, but the current generation of cards might be getting even more expensive.

The core reason for this speculation is that memory demands across the tech industry have skyrocketed in recent months, due to the continued massive growth of AI. More, and ever-larger, data centers, along with smaller, more localized uses - such as workstation GPUs - have caused resources to be funneled into creating products for those more lucrative sectors of the industry. This simply leaves less product available to serve the less profitable consumer/gaming section of the market.

We've already seen how RAM prices have more than doubled in the last month or so, with SSD prices also expected to rise, and now VRAM is also being affected. It's too early to tell just how much of a short or long-term supply issue this will be, especially if the AI bubble bursts, but signs generally at the moment are that AI isn't imploding any time soon.

As for whether this rumor is true, if Nvidia genuinely intended to launch this lineup of cards late this year, or at the start of next year (most rumors point to an announcement at the CES trade show in early January), I'd be surprised if it completely scrapped those plans. At this stage, some graphics cards are likely to have already been produced, so choosing not to launch those could be costly. Meanwhile, Nvidia can simply choose to announce the products, then wait for supply to catch up - what's known as a paper launch - which is a situation we've seen a number of times in recent years across various sections of the industry.

Then again, it's also possible that all the previous rumors weren't true and that the Super cards don't exist or were never meant to launch so soon - this is all conjecture for now. We've reached out to Nvidia for comment on the situation.