Credit: Nvidia

Whether you’re a gamer trying to play recent AAA titles at high resolutions and maxed-out settings or an AI enthusiast trying to run models locally, we’ve reached the point where a GPU with 8GB of video memory is a pretty limiting bottleneck. But because of ongoing memory shortages and price spikes, it’s also a uniquely bad time for GPU makers to attempt to fix this problem—rumors suggested that a RAM-boosting mid-generation “Super” refresh for Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs was quietly delayed or canceled earlier this year, at least in part because of memory costs.

One of Nvidia’s GPUs is getting a RAM upgrade, according to an announcement the company buried at the bottom of a blog post about a routine Game Ready driver update. The laptop version of the GeForce RTX 5070 is getting a bump from 8GB to 12GB of GDDR7, a 50 percent increase that should reduce some performance bottlenecks and generally future-proof the GPU.

Otherwise, the 12GB version of the mobile RTX 5070 is the same as the 8GB version. The RAM is still connected to the GPU with a 128-bit memory interface, and the GPU still has 4,608 CUDA cores. The mobile 5070 uses the same GB206 silicon die as the desktop RTX 5060 instead of the larger, more powerful GB205 die in the desktop version of the RTX 5070, meaning that despite the RAM increase, the desktop version remains a much more powerful GPU.

But the main problem is the price, not the specs.

Modular laptop maker Framework was one of the first to announce a product including the new 12GB RTX 5070: an update to the Framework Laptop 16. It serves mostly to highlight what an awful deal the mobile RTX 5070 is right now; as a standalone upgrade, the 8GB version costs $699, and the 12GB version costs a whopping $1,199, a 71.5 percent increase for an otherwise identical GPU. (The pricing is similar when you’re buying a new Laptop 16, and the GeForce GPUs are also only available with the more expensive, higher-end AMD Ryzen CPU options.)

Framework has blamed “the pricing we’re seeing from silicon suppliers” for the new module’s price, and it said the price for the 8GB version was also likely to go up “once we deplete our current inventory of the GDDR7 capacity it uses.”

Framework is just one manufacturer, but other laptop makers will be dealing with the same suppliers and pricing problems. Unfortunately, this suggests that we can all look forward to paying as much for a 12GB RTX 5070 as we used to pay for an entire midrange gaming PC.