Nvidia in 2025 is behaving much like a celebrity who continues to bank on past laurels, but expects the same devotion from their followers that they once rightfully claimed. While AMD and Intel strive to deliver improved graphics cards every generation, Nvidia seems to be regressing. Whether it's generational gains, price-to-performance, or sufficient VRAM, Team Green is failing on all counts.

The latter is what I want to talk about today, since Nvidia isn't taking the hint. GPUs with 8GB VRAM were a red flag back in 2020, but Nvidia continues to skimp even five years later. It is launching $400 graphics cards with paltry VRAM in the name of "budget GPUs," only to create artificial segmentation that forces consumers to pony up for the next tier.

Nvidia is still launching 8GB GPUs in 2025

Talk about being tone-deaf

Nvidia's Blackwell launch hasn't been going well from the start. Paper launches, sky-high MSRPs, and little improvement in raw performance painted a bleak picture for the RTX 50 series cards. The company's VRAM problem reared its head again when everything but the RTX 5090 shipped with lackluster VRAM for the price. The RTX 5080 retained the same 16GB framebuffer as the RTX 4080, and the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti followed suit with the 12GB and 16GB VRAM seen on the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti Super, respectively.

With the announcement of the RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5060, however, Nvidia's VRAM strategy went from questionable to confounding. Even in 2025, Nvidia is launching an 8GB variant of the RTX 5060 Ti for almost $400, and the 8GB RTX 5060 for $299. Despite the universal backlash against 8GB VRAM GPUs that has been bubbling for five years now, Nvidia isn't budging. 8GB of VRAM is insultingly low for today's games, even at 1080p, thanks to larger-than-ever texture sizes and complex ray tracing effects.

You can simply compare the performance of the 16GB and 8GB variants of the RTX 5060 Ti to see the problem — the 8GB suffers from crashes or sub-30 FPS performance while the 16GB variant fares much better. When companies like AMD and Intel have been launching cards with 16GB of VRAM in the same price segment for years, how is Nvidia still committing daylight robbery? The company is leveraging its strong mindshare and the lack of VRAM awareness on the part of many consumers to sell terrible GPUs that shouldn't exist, at least not at the prices Nvidia is selling them at.

Product segmentation doesn't need VRAM discrimination

Nvidia is pushing you to buy more

An argument used by many to justify Nvidia's VRAM discrimination in the mid-range and budget segments often centers around segmentation. It says that the company needs to differentiate its offerings using many features, one of which is VRAM. The problem here is that it doesn't cost Nvidia too much to provide more, or at least sufficient VRAM on its graphics cards, if the intent is there to begin with.

Nvidia could very well engineer the PCBs to accommodate more memory chips if it really wanted to provide GPUs with a respectable amount of VRAM. However, the company is using VRAM as a lever to create artificial segmentation — a consumer who only needs the raw power of the RTX 5060 would be forced to buy the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB only to get access to a larger framebuffer.

Nvidia's graphics cards need to come with enough VRAM capacities so as not to become bottlenecks for GPU performance at larger resolutions, or even in 1080p ray tracing scenarios. Customers shopping in the sub-$500 segment shouldn't have to beg for sufficient VRAM. Nvidia shouldn't be allowed to treat $300–$450 GPUs as a mere ladder rung to push most people to its 70-class GPUs.

Nvidia's pricing betrays the "budget" argument

Is the RTX 5060 Ti a budget GPU?

Finally, the argument that 8GB VRAM is justified for "budget" GPUs falls flat, since Nvidia stopped pricing its offerings like budget GPUs long ago. There was a time when affordable GPUs like the GTX 1660 Super were all gamers needed for decent 1440p gaming. Today, while companies like Intel are offering excellent 1440p GPUs like the Arc B580 for $250 (if you can buy one at MSRP), Nvidia is launching GPUs like the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB that can't even run some of the latest titles.

Even if you assume that you can buy an RTX 5060 Ti for $379 (8GB) or $429 (16GB), these are still not "budget" GPUs, and certainly not cards that "deserve" an 8GB framebuffer. The industry has more or less moved on from slapping 8GB of VRAM on affordable GPUs, but Nvidia is still busy stretching the definition of "budget." In all honesty, the upcoming RTX 5060 should be priced around $200 instead of $300 to make any sense in this market.

I know that won't happen. The most we can hope for is that Nvidia looks at the embarrassing reception of the RTX 5060 and cuts its price by $50, which would still not be remotely enough to justify its existence. 8GB VRAM GPUs are only good enough for less-demanding titles at 1080p, but that's not how Nvidia chooses to market them, misleading unsuspecting consumers into buying terrible value products.

Nvidia is stuck in the age of 8GB VRAM

Nvidia knows what it's doing — banking on enough gullible consumers to buy into its brand value and woefully incapable 8GB VRAM GPUs. While the industry has moved on to 16GB VRAM even in the budget segment, Nvidia continues to create artificial segmentation with VRAM discrimination. The RTX 5060 Ti 8GB isn't a budget GPU at $379, and it has no business featuring only 8GB of VRAM. Even the upcoming RTX 5060 should be priced at $200 to justify its existence. Nvidia, however, remains deaf to criticism.