RTX 5050 could use the same 20 Gbps GDDR6 VRAM as the RX 9070 XT and RTX 4070 — Nvidia’s budget card to leverage fastest GDDR6 possible

The RTX 5050 has already been tipped to feature GDDR6 memory rather than GDDR7 found in the RTX 5060 through RTX 5090. However, what was still unknown was the speed bin Nvidia would choose. Leaker MEGAsizeGPU on X reports that the RTX 5050 will allegedly utilize the fastest version of GDDR6 in mass production — 20 Gbps modules, which are used in AMD’s RX 9070 series GPUs and Nvidia’s GDDR6 variant of the RTX 4070.

If the X leak is accurate, the RTX 5050 will feature 320GB/s of memory bandwidth, 40% of the bandwidth of the RTX 5060 (which boasts 448GB/s of memory bandwidth). The massive drop-off in memory bandwidth goes hand in hand with the RTX 5050’s 50% drop in CUDA cores from the RTX 5060. It remains to be seen what the RTX 5050 would be capable of with GDDR7, but it is likely the GPU’s significantly cut-down compute power will prevent the 20 Gbps GDDR6 modules from being a major bottleneck.

The 20 Gbps speed bin is the fastest version of GDDR6 used by any GPU currently. This latest variant is nearly as fast as Micron’s 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory modules used in Nvidia’s RTX 30 series and RTX 40 series. Micron’s G6X is just 5% quicker than the aforementioned GDDR6 counterpart. Technically, Samsung has developed 24 Gbps GDDR6 memory modules, but those are not in mass production (and may never be).

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At least for the Samsung version, the main advantage of GDDR6 is its power consumption; Samsung’s 20 GBps GDDR6 requires just 1.1V to operate. By contrast, older versions of GDDR6 and Micron’s GDDR6X memory require 1.35V (or 23% more voltage) to function. Though strangely, SK hynix’s does not have any GDDR6 variants with a voltage rating below 1.35V, suggesting its 20 Gbps counterpart runs at 1.35V.