Nvidia’s planned 12GB RTX 5070 plan is a mistake

Nvidia’s reportedly revealing their RTX 5070 at CES 2025

Rumour has it that Nvidia plans to reveal their RTX 5070 at CES 2025, with @kopite7kimi claiming that the GPU is a 250W card with 12GB of GDDR7 VRAM.

Currently, the performance projections of this GPU are unknown. However, this GPU’s 250W power requirement is 50W higher than Nvidia’s RTX 4070. This suggests that this GPU will perform similarly to, or better than, Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti. This assumes that Nvidia’s 250W RTX 5070 is more power efficient than Nvidia’s 285W RTX 4070 Ti.

If these leaked specifications are true, we are disappointed in Nvidia. 12GB of VRAM is not a huge amount of VRAM for a high-end graphics card. It also leaves us concerned about the memory specifications of Nvidia’s RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti graphics cards. Will Nvidia’s RTX 5060 series be limited once again by 8GB memory pools?

It is 12GB.

— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) October 9, 2024

Wccftech claims that Nvidia’s RTX 5070 will use 12GB of 28Gbps GDDR7 memory over a 192-bit memory bus, which should give this graphics card ample memory bandwidth. However, modern games are using more VRAM than ever, and there are already titles where 12GB of VRAM is insufficient to run games at maxed-out settings. Memory capacity matters, and Nvidia could be much more generous to its users.

It looks like Nvidia will launch its RTX 5070 with a constrained memory pool, preventing it from being as great as it could be for creators, game modders, and 4K users. What’s worse, this means that Nvidia’s lower-end RTX 50 series GPUs will likely be more memory-constrained. This could create an opening for AMD and Intel to exploit in the lower-end GPU market, assuming they are more generous with their memory specifications.

You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s 12GB RTX 5070 plans on the OC3D Forums.