NVIDIA RTX 5050 9GB reportedly canceled, RTX 3060 12GB to take its place

NVIDIA's rumored RTX 5050 9GB might not happen at all. According to leaker MEGAsizeGPU, the card is "canceled, or permanently delayed," and board partners say they haven't gotten any fresh info on it either. The same source claims NVIDIA reissued the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB for that exact segment, which makes a new 5050 variant pretty redundant for now.

This isn't the first time MEGAsizeGPU has called this one correctly. Back in April, the leaker said NVIDIA was pausing the RTX 5050's bump from 8GB to 9GB because the RTX 3060 12GB was coming back in June. That part already checked out, the RTX 3060 12GB has started showing up at retail, spotted in China around $325 to $347, and in parts of Europe for more than its original $329 launch price.

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The rumored 9GB 5050 always looked like an awkward card anyway. It would have swapped GDDR6 for GDDR7 but cut the memory bus from 128-bit to 96-bit, so bandwidth barely moved (336GB/s versus 320GB/s) for just 1GB of extra VRAM. Bringing back a 5-year-old Ampere chip on Samsung's 8nm node looks like the easier move for NVIDIA, especially with GDDR7 supply and TSMC's 4nm capacity tied up by RTX 40 and 50 series production during the ongoing memory crunch.

It helps that the RTX 3060 12GB never really lost relevance either. It reclaimed the top spot on Steam's hardware survey earlier this year, so demand for a budget card with that much VRAM clearly hasn't gone anywhere. That said, older cards are more likely to reach the top spots since they have had more time to build a larger user base, so this data point should be taken with context.

For buyers, this means NVIDIA's entry-level lineup is relying on a GPU from January 2021, one that lacks DLSS Frame Generation, Multi-Frame Generation, and newer encoding features. More VRAM than most 8GB budget cards is the upside, and that matters more now than it did in 2021.

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Pricing is the real question. Early listings sitting at or above the original MSRP suggest buyers shouldn't expect 2021-level prices this time around. The memory shortages have spared no one, and it seems like even a 5-year-old graphics card is not exempt from the VRAM tax.

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NVIDIA hasn't said anything official about the RTX 5050 9GB, so this is still an unconfirmed leak for now. We do not know for sure whether the GPU has been canceled or will appear down the line in some form.