Did Nvidia Fix the RTX 5070?

The Problem with the RTX 5070

While the RTX 50 series was not very well received upon launch for either the desktop or laptop lineups, the RTX 5070 was considered to be the worst value in Nvidia’s 2025 RTX 50 series laptop lineup. It had several flaws compared to GPUs lower down the stack, like the RTX 5060, while it had notable issues compared to GPUs higher up the stack, like the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080. Unfortunately, there were two motherboard options in this generation, either the 5070 and below, or the 5070 Ti and above. This led to many manufacturers limiting their thinner and lighter gaming laptops to the lower end motherboard, meaning they capped out at a 5070.

The biggest flaw of the RTX 5070 was that it came with only 8 GB of VRAM, which is often inadequate for modern AAA games at resolutions above 1920x1200. This is especially annoying as many laptops with this GPU came with screens around 2560x1600, since they were often more premium. This is especially annoying in the laptop space as your GPU is soldered to the motherboard and upgrading requires a whole new laptop.

Some issues that can arise with limited VRAM at these higher resolutions are as follows:

• The game will fail to load textures properly or have to swap them in and out of VRAM constantly. This can happen either when panning the in-game camera around or even sometimes while you are standing still, not moving the camera, and looking directly at in-game objects. This means the game technically isn’t running correctly, despite what the frame rate and 1% low counters may tell you. Games that do this when VRAM is exceeded include Hogwart’s Legacy (without ray-tracing enabled), Forspoken, Halo Infinite, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.
• The game will have either normal or slightly lower average frame rates for the class of GPU it is in, but will sometimes stutter as the VRAM buffer is exceeded. This leads to poor 1% low performance. This can make games that have big discrepancies between the average frame rate and the 1% lows feel worse than a slightly lower frame rate but more stable 1% lows. For example, the same game with an average framerate of 60 fps but with 1% lows around 20 fps can feel worse than the same game running with an average framerate of 50 fps but with 1% lows around 36 fps.
• The game will simply crash, either once loaded or in some cases after playing for a period of time. This happened to Hardware Unboxed when they tested A Plague Tale: Requiem for a few minutes for benchmarking, but it is also known to happen (in the most recent example) in Indiana Jones & The Great Circle after applying any preset higher than medium, even at 1080p.

The Unconfirmed Solution

While there were initially rumors of an “RTX 50 series refresh” in 2026 with more VRAM, many assumed that this refresh was dead because of the current RAM shortages and resulting price increases. However, in early March 2026, multiple reports emerged of laptop product pages from Lenovo and Asus with RTX 5070 GPUs listed as 12 GB of VRAM. Given two OEMs noted this dGPU independently, it made it seem unlikely that this was a listing error, although it is still important to remember that this product is only rumored. It has not been officially confirmed by Lenovo, Asus, or Nvidia.

Regardless, we are hopeful for the prospect of more VRAM in potentially thinner form factors as we expect the motherboard might be more similar to the smaller 5070 compatible one than the 5070 Ti's. Many manufacturers are limiting their offerings this year to a 5070 still, but this refresh might help future-proof them. This means people would not have to replace their laptops as soon when modern games get more difficult to run. Laptops like the Lenovo Legion 7i and Acer's Predator Helios Neo 16S have the potential to be much more compelling, and we're excited to see what manufacturers will do with this rumored refresh.