TECH NEWS – The NSA whistleblower who leaked classified documents about the US surveillance state to the press in 2013 is not happy with Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics cards.

Snowden was surprisingly critical of the RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090, and he had an incredibly harsh review of the RTX 5080 on Twitter. This came completely out of the blue, and you have to admit, he’s not wrong…

“Endless next-quarter thinking has reduced the Nvidia brand to ‘F-tier value at S-tier prices’. The RTX 5070 should have at least 16 VRAM, the RTX 5080 should have 24GB/32GB SKUs, and the RTX 5090 should have 32GB, 48GB, or more. Releasing a $1,000 GPU in 2025 with a crippling 16 GB is a monopolistic crime against the consumer,” Snowden wrote.

Endless next-quarter thinking has reduced the Nvidia brand to “F-tier value for S-tier prices”. 5070 should have had 16GB VRAM minimum, 5080 w 24/32 SKUs, 5090 32/48/+. Releasing a $1,000+ GPU in 2025 with a crippling 16GB is a monopolistic crime against the consumer.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) January 31, 2025

The RTX 5080 has a suggested retail price of $1000, so Snowden had some harsh criticism for that. This is the card that doesn’t have stellar test results, and for good reason: 8GB of VRAM will soon not be enough to play games at 1440p, and 16GB will be too little to play games at 4K. The RTX 5080’s performance is barely better than the previous generation of cards, except for DLSS 4…

The RTX 5070 didn’t get a good review from the editors of Digital Foundry: they think it should be close to 12 GB minimum at 1440p, so at all price points you can say that Nvidia is very stingy with VRAM. Even with GDDR7 on the cards, the amount is still ridiculously low. The only reason why Nvidia can do all this is because of its market share and its apparent dominance in AI, there is no one to counter it…

China’s DeepSeek has wiped out 17% of Nvidia’s market value (a $600 billion loss). That’s the kind of sobering blow the company needs.

Source: PCGamer