RTX 5080 Super’s rumoured 24GB upgrade faces delay as GPU prices climb

Board partners reportedly still lack design details for Nvidia’s unannounced card, casting doubt on a January 2027 launch as rising prices and tight memory supplies squeeze the wider GPU market.

Nvidia’s rumoured RTX 5080 Super may not arrive when buyers were expecting it, adding fresh uncertainty to an already strained graphics-card market. Reports cited by HotHardware, drawing on Taiwanese publication Benchlife, suggest that board partners still have not received the design information they were reportedly due to get in October. That has raised doubts over a previously discussed January 2027 launch window, although Nvidia has not officially announced the card, its specifications or any release date.

If the rumoured model does eventually appear, the headline feature would be a jump to 24GB of video memory, up from 16GB on the standard RTX 5080. That would make the card more appealing to players using high-resolution displays, as well as to creators and users running local AI workloads that benefit from larger memory buffers. But a bigger memory configuration also makes the product more exposed to supply constraints in a market where component availability is already under pressure.

The wider context is a graphics-card market in which prices have moved sharply higher across several segments. TechSpot’s October 2026 survey of retail prices in ten countries found that the RTX 5080 reached about $2,200 in the United States, roughly 120 per cent above its launch recommended retail price there. The same report showed that pricing trends vary widely by market, with some regions seeing much steeper increases than others. It is a snapshot of retail conditions, not proof that a single factor, such as memory shortages, explains every increase.

Scarcity at the top end of Nvidia’s line-up has become part of the broader picture. PC Gamer reported that Nvidia denied claims that the RTX 5090 had been discontinued, even as supply remained constrained and the card became harder to find through official and retail channels. Tom’s Hardware has similarly documented how retailer listings and stock changes fed speculation, while stopping short of treating those signals as evidence that production had ended. The distinction matters: limited availability is not the same as a product being withdrawn.

At the same time, pricing pressure is no longer confined to the most expensive models. TechSpot’s data showed sharp rises for lower-tier Nvidia cards as well, including the RTX 5050, while some European prices for the RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti also moved higher. That is a significant shift for the mainstream market, where buyers are usually most sensitive to value. Once entry-level and mid-range cards start climbing in cost, the practical cost of building or upgrading a gaming PC rises quickly.

There is also a wider supply-chain issue at work. Tom’s Hardware reported that Micron is shifting GDDR7 output towards higher-density 3GB chips and away from 2GB parts, a move that reflects growing demand from AI-linked customers. Separately, the Associated Press reported that Samsung expects AI-chip demand to outpace supply through 2027 as data-centre investment expands. Those developments do not prove that any single GPU delay has a single cause, but they do help explain why memory and manufacturing priorities are becoming more contested. For PC gamers, the result is a market in which even a rumoured upgrade with more VRAM may arrive too late, or at too high a price, to offer much relief.