Rumours persist that Nvidia is readying 8GB variants of its GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 970 Maxwell-powered graphics cards in order to meet the consumer demand for a 4K gaming standard. Up until recently 4GB VRAM seemed like plenty for any top of the range graphics card to have, but new titles such as Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor have been demanding as much as 6GB GDDR5 memory to use its ultra-HD textures.

It’s worth bearing in mind that those mind boggling Shadow of Mordor requirements were targeted at 1080p gaming, so it stands to reason that Nvidia would be interest in bumping up the specs of its flagship cards and pushing out a single-GPU 4K solution.

Reports indicate that Nvidia is intending to push these cards to market before year's end, so if you’re looking at getting into 4K gaming then it might be worth holding out and waiting for these. SLI setups don’t stack their VRAM so this is definitely going to be as good as it gets for 4K gaming right now.

It’s thought Nvidia is preparing to these combat AMD’s planned relaunch of its Radeon R9 290X graphics cards with 8GB onboard GDDR5 memory which we reported on earlier this week. AMD’s GPUs are expected in November so it could be a busy few months this holiday period for both Nvidia and AMD.

We’re surprised at just how quickly 4K gaming seems to be catching on. This time last year it felt like a bit of a pipe dream but already 4K monitors are dropping to reasonable prices and we’re finally getting viable single-GPU 4K gaming solutions. Will you be tempted to join the 4K revolution with either of these new cards? Or is it still likely to be a little too expensive for your tastes? Let us know!