Nvidia’s RTX 5070 laptops give me little hope for desktop RTX 5060s

At CES 2025, Nvidia unveiled its next-generation laptop lineup. GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs. While the desktop GeForce RTX 5090 has generated the most excitement for its impressive specs, we’ve also seen laptop GPUs – and these mobile GPUs could foreshadow what we can expect from yet-to-be-announced desktop GPUs like the RTX 5060 .

Laptop GPUs come in RTX 5070, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5090 variants. But the thing is, Nvidia’s laptop GPUs don’t match the same specs as their desktop counterparts (for obvious reasons: smaller form factors and thermal headroom). As a past example, the RTX 4090 laptop only had 16GB of VRAM compared to its desktop counterpart’s 24GB.

Following this trend, I see a big problem when reading GeForce RTX 5070 laptop specifications. It only comes with 8GB of VRAM, and assuming the desktop RTX 5060 comes with a lower name, it will likely have 8GB of VRAM as well. (This is purely speculative as we don’t know any specifications or release date for such a GPU.)

Both the 8GB versions of the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti have faced significant backlash due to their paltry VRAM. PCWorld’s Brad Chakos even stated as much The 8GB of VRAM in the RTX 4060 Ti made it a low value. It wasn’t enough then, and it’s definitely not enough now in 2025. Seeing this on an RTX 5060 or Ti variant would be terrible.

Gamers Don’t Need 8GB GPUs in 2025

Over the last few years, games have made unprecedented use of higher textures and ray tracing, both of which tend to require a lot of VRAM even at lower resolutions like 1080p. If you’re like me, you’ve probably cranked up your game settings as high as possible and just hope your GPU can handle it. But with only 8GB of VRAM available in 2025, this is becoming an increasingly difficult task.

When testing GeForce RTX 40 series laptops, I found that some games looked completely different depending on what textures were loaded into VRAM. For example, Hogwarts Legacy looked great on a mobile RTX 4090 with 16GB of VRAM, but was noticeably different from a laptop GPU with 8GB. Even at the same lower settings on both machines—settings that an 8GB GPU should be able to handle—textures were missing.

8 GB of video memory of the RTX 5070 laptop were cleared by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as an attempt to “achieve balance.” In a laptop, this balance is determined by price, temperature and power consumption; for desktop GPUs, balance means cost and product segmentation. But is it worth paying less for a GPU if it means only 8GB of VRAM? Not if you ask me. Any serious slot machine Requires at least 12 GB of video memory in 2025.

What can Nvidia do to mitigate the impact?

To be fair, the RTX 5060’s potential 8GB of VRAM will certainly be helped by new Nvidia hardware and technologies. This is the new Blackwell architecture with its upgraded Ray Tracing (RT) and next-generation Tensor Cores, as well as GDDR7 memory if Nvidia includes it in the RTX 5060. These, combined with technologies like DLSS 4 with multi-frame generation, help games run better .

However, while these are great technologies that harness the power of artificial intelligence to maximize performance, they still don’t make up for the lack of video memory. Nvidia will have to do something to minimize the negative impact that an 8GB RTX 5060 or 5060 Ti will have on the minds of gamers.

The only thing Nvidia could do if it had an RTX 5060 Ti is launch it with 16GB of VRAM outright. This is a strange amount of RAM for a GPU in this class, especially considering that the RTX 5070 only has 12GB. But this is not unprecedented. Nvidia did the same with the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB variant, despite the RTX 4070 having 12GB.

Okay, what about the base RTX 5060? I don’t see a plausible scenario in which Nvidia would increase the memory to 12GB, but there are a few options that could minimize this issue.

Take a look at the GeForce RTX 50 Series lineup and you’ll see price cuts across various models. The RTX 5070 now costs $549 ($50 cheaper than the $599 RTX 4070 Super). Likewise, the RTX 5070 Ti now costs $749 ($50 cheaper than the RTX 4070 Ti Super). If Nvidia could somehow lower the starting price of the RTX 5060, I could see that this class of GPU could at least be a reasonable choice for many. While $249 may be aggressive, even $279 should appease some. This doesn’t change the fact that 8GB of VRAM is still not enough for many modern games, but hopefully it will be acceptable given DLSS 4.

This will certainly help achieve the “balance” that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang mentioned, with a more balanced price to offset the 8GB of VRAM. However, 8GB will leave this part of the market wide open for AMD to take over and capture market share – if it can provide more 12GB and 16GB GPUs at a reasonable price-performance ratio.

Only time will tell what will happen, but right now I’m not optimistic. If the RTX 5060 comes out with 8GB of VRAM and it’s not absurdly cheap, I’ll probably prefer to spend a little more for the 12GB RTX 5070. On the other hand, Nvidia may end up going in an unexpected direction with its desktop GPUs, even though that a laptop with an 8GB RTX 5070 is already in use.