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Whistleblower Edward Snowden, who in 2013 leaked classified documents to the press revealing the existence of an extensive US digital surveillance regime, has come out as a surprisingly scathing critic of Nvidia’s new RTX 50-series of graphics cards.
“Endless next-quarter thinking has reduced the Nvidia brand to ‘F-tier value for S-tier prices,'” Snowden wrote on Twitter. “5070 should have had 16 VRAM minimum, 5080 24/32 SKUs, 5090 32/48/+. Releasing a $1,000 GPU in 2025 with a crippling 16 GB is a monopolistic crime against the consumer.”
After leaking documents that revealed the extent of the US National Security Agency’s regime of global digital surveillance to The Intercept, Snowden avoided prosecution in the US by fleeing to Moscow, where he lives with his family as a naturalized Russian citizen. Snowden has continued to write and speak about surveillance, cybersecurity, computing, and politics in the years since.
And I was nodding to myself saying “Yeah Edward Snowden, you’re onto something with this one.” For clarity, the $1,000 GPU with 16 gigs of VRAM in question is the RTX 5080, which left PCG hardware honcho Dave James nonplussed in his review, calling it a “strangely unexciting” card with minimal gen-on-gen performance uplift without the admittedly impressive DLSS multi frame gen technology. The RTX 5090 fared a little better, with Dave praising both its standard and AI-augmented performance despite a $400 price increase over the 4090.
The upcoming RTX 5070 is promising an impressive RTX 4090* level of performance (with multi frame gen enabled) at $550, but that 12 GB of VRAM is concerning: In a recent video, members of Digital Foundry discussed how it should be an acceptable amount for 1440p gaming right now, but what about down the line? My RTX 3070’s once-voluminous 8 gigs now gets slurped up immediately by any triple-A game at 1440p, and I find myself eyeballing the $750, 16 GB 5070 Ti as a potential upgrade instead.
Nvidia’s market dominance and AI business have left it pretty much untouchable, even as we seem to be getting another mixed bag graphics card generation after the unexciting 40-series—that dominance may not be as iron-clad as it once seemed, though. The RTX 5080 and 5090 sold out immediately at UK retailers, but it’s unclear how much that was driven by demand versus extremely limited stock, leading Gamers Nexus to deem it a paper launch. Meanwhile, the potential OpenAI killer out of China, DeepSeek, managed to slash more than $600 billion from Nvidia’s valuation with the announcement of its new R1 AI model that demands significantly less GPU compute for a similar result to market leaders.
What would really change things for gamers would be some consistent competition from AMD and/or Intel. At the moment, that doesn’t seem super likely: The upcoming RX 9070 has so far only left us whelmed at best with its leaked benchmarks, and Intel’s upcoming Battlemage cards look to be moving in the right direction, but aren’t world beaters quite yet.
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Kurt Indovina
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