Edward Snowden, who is said to have leaked classified information about the US's global surveillance programs in 2013, has made surprising remarks about the release of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs.
Edward Snowden Makes Surprising Remarks Against NVIDIA's RTX Blackwell GPUs, Showing Consumer Sentiment Towards It
Well, now one is satisfied with the launch of NVIDIA's RTX Blackwell GPUs, since not only were the inventory levels way too low this time, but the performance for SKUs such as the GeForce RTX 5080 is too underwhelming. The sentiment around Team Green's newest GPUs is so disappointing that Edward Snowden decided to pass comments around the release, claiming it to be a "monopolistic crime against the consumer", when referring to the value these SKUs are bringing to the markets.
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
Edward claims that NVIDIA's RTX Blackwell GPUs should have more VRAM onboard and that slapping a $1,000+ price tag on the RTX 5080 makes no sense at all. These statements certainly reflect the consumer reaction to the release, and considering how low the initial batch of retailing SKUs was, it seems like Team Green did try to create artificial demand, although we won't go much into this theory. In our review of the MSI SUPRIM GeForce RTX 5080, we concluded that the generational uplifts weren't on the level that they should've been, making an upgrade from Ada Lovelace basically a poor decision.
The higher-end GPU segment definitely needs competition to pop up since NVIDIA is the sole competitor. This means that buyers would have no other choice when looking for GPUs with high computational power. Sure, when you add up technologies like DLSS 4 and Frame-Gen, the performance gets pretty improved, but despite that, the perf/$ value simply puts the RTX Blackwell SKUs as not the ideal choice.
It would be interesting to see how the situation turns out once AMD's RX 9070 series SKUs launch into the market, since that's when we'll see the mainstream GPU segment heating up. Team Red has pledged one of the best performance-per-dollar ratios with the Radeon RX 9070 XT, and given that the GPUs will launch in March alongside NVIDIA's 60-class models, consumers should definitely wait for it.
About the author: Muhammad Zuhair is a hardware and technology reporter for Wccftech, specializing in the semiconductor industry and the complex interplay between technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. His coverage focuses on the corporate strategies and technological roadmaps of industry giants like TSMC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel. Zuhair's expertise lies in deconstructing complex topics such as fabrication nodes (e.g., 2nm process), the economic impact of policies like the CHIPS Act, and the strategic development of AI infrastructure from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
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