VRAM Stagnation in Mid-Range GPUs: Is Nvidia Protecting its AI Market?
PROfil_Official · reddit · 2026-08-03
A Reddit user complains that Nvidia's 70-class desktop GPUs (like the 4070 and 5070) have been stuck at 12GB of VRAM for two generations. Compared to the 8GB of the 1070 in 2016, that's only a 4GB increase over a decade.
The author points out that while compute cores keep improving, the real bottleneck is memory. A $550 gaming card with 24GB VRAM would be a highly cost-effective machine for running local LLMs. While there's no direct proof, the incentive aligns too neatly: Nvidia likely limits consumer cards' AI capabilities to protect its lucrative market for expensive, VRAM-heavy AI cards.
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