Nvidia at CES this year pleased with the announcement of GeForce RTX 50 series video cards, but at least one of them turned out to be a dubious offer – the mobile version of the RTX 5070 turned out to have only 8 GB of memory, and in the realities of 2025 this may not be enough, writes PCWorld.
Image source: nvidia.com
Laptops with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, the low-end graphics card in the new line, have a suggested retail price of $1,299, and that’s inexpensive for a mobile gaming computer: models with the top-of-the-line RTX 5090 start at $2,899. The price difference is significant, but the mobile RTX 5070 only has 8GB of video memory. The junior video card has 5th generation tensor cores and 4th generation ray tracing cores; it supports scaling with artificial intelligence DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation – generating three frames per one drawn. And video memory is represented by fast and efficient GDDR7 chips, which debuted in the RTX 50 Series Blackwell family.
But this is where the advantages of the video card end. Even with the new type of video memory, its capacity is only 8 GB. Nvidia appears to be counting on issues with ray tracing and high-resolution textures being offset by improved cores and DLSS 4. And in this context, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s statement seems appropriate: “We strive to achieve balance [across the system]. We don’t always achieve the right balance, but that’s the goal.” In other words, Nvidia is ready to admit that 8 GB by the standards of 2025 may not be enough, but “balance” means a complex of factors: a relatively low price, a small laptop thickness and high energy efficiency, that is, long battery life.
The mobile Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 actually consumes from 50 to 100 W, and the next in the line, the RTX 5070 Ti, requires from 65 to 115 W. Of course, “just adding more video memory” won’t work—you need to correlate its volume with the capabilities of the GPU and think in advance about what it can support without affecting the rest of the laptop’s hardware. But the desktop version of the younger RTX 5070 still has 12 GB of memory, and this is the minimum for a $549 video card. Apparently, for these reasons, Intel added 12 GB of memory to its Arc B570 with a price tag of $250, and AMD will not be greedy with video card memory. And in the future, Nvidia will probably also release the GeForce RTX 5060, and if its desktop version also receives 8 GB of memory, then the problem will only get worse.