Nvidia’s RTX 5080 Super could be coming much sooner than expected

All eyes are on Nvidia and AMD as they get ready to launch some of the best graphics cards for the mainstream market, meaning the RTX 5060 and the RX 9060 XT. However, a new leak tells us that Nvidia is working on a GPU that’s set to come out later this year, and it’s one that might finally live up to the expectations. I’m talking about the RTX 5080 Super (or Ti).

The tantalizing leak comes from Baidu and was first shared by Wccftech. According to the leaker, who is a moderator on the Baidu forums, Nvidia will launch the RTX 5080S or the RTX 5080 Ti at the end of the year. Spec-wise, we don’t know much, but the leaker says it’s “basically certain” that the new graphics card will sport 24GB of VRAM, which marks an 8GB upgrade over the RTX 5080. That kind of memory capacity would also put the GPU on par with the RTX 4090.

Upon launch of the RTX 5080, many were hoping that it’d replace the last-gen RTX 4090. Unfortunately, the card never made it to that level, and even overclocking can’t bring it on par with the Ada flagship. However, depending on the specs of the rumored RTX 5080 Super, we might see the two cards battle it out on more even ground.

Memory alone won’t be enough to boost the bandwidth significantly; the GPU would also need a wider memory bus to match, and ideally, more CUDA cores. In the RTX 40-series, the RTX 4080 and the RTX 4080 Super were practically the same GPU in terms of specs, with a minor uplift in CUDA cores for the Super card and no changes to the memory interface. As a result, the GPU was around 1-3% faster than its predecessor.

The exciting thing here is that the RTX 5080 Super/Ti might arrive sooner than expected. If Nvidia does launch it at the end of 2025, it’ll change things up compared to its previous release cycle, where the Super refresh came at the beginning of the year, meaning a bit over a year after the initial launch of the RTX 4080.

Even if the above turns out to be true, I wouldn’t expect any announcements from Nvidia until the final quarter of the year, so we’ll just have to be patient.