In context: GPU prices have been climbing steadily over the past year, and a big part of that comes down to a global shortage of memory chips. That's made shopping for a new graphics card feel like a losing battle. So when Nvidia last year shipped the RTX 5070 mobile with just 8GB of VRAM – down from the desktop version's 12GB – laptop gamers were understandably annoyed. But that might actually be changing pretty soon.
Multiple laptop listings from both Lenovo and Asus now show an RTX 5070 mobile GPU packing 12GB of GDDR7. The whole thing started when a leaker known as Huang514613 spotted Lenovo's upcoming Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition listing the card with 12GB.
But it wasn't alone as Asus did the same with its ROG Zephyrus G14 2026, ranked by us as one of the best gaming laptops of the year so far. On top of those, Newegg listings for the ROG Strix G16 reference 12GB, too.
Nvidia hasn't officially confirmed the new GPU yet. We also don't know much else about what's under the hood. But it would be reasonable to expect the rest of the hardware to stay roughly the same, though power consumption might bump up a little – squeezing in more memory chips can result in that. Either way, it's impressive considering the massive memory crisis induced by the AI boom.
One theory floating around, as pointed out by Notebookcheck, is that Nvidia might just kill off the RTX 5070 Ti on laptops altogether and fold the 5070 mobile into a single 12GB option. That would free up GB205 silicon for professional-grade RTX Pro 3000 workstation cards instead.
There's also a competitive angle worth noting: AMD still doesn't have any RDNA 4 laptops on the market, but the Radeon RX 9000M family is supposedly coming soon. Bumping the 5070 mobile to 12GB right now feels like Nvidia trying to get ahead of that.
Today, nearly a third of Steam gamers are still running 8GB cards, according to the platform's own data – and that's increasingly turning tight for the latest AAA games. We already found in our own review of the desktop RTX 5070 that even 12GB can buckle under heavy ray tracing workloads. Games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle turned practically unplayable at full RT settings in our testing. So a bump to 12GB on laptops makes the GPU a much easier recommendation in the big 2026.