It’s the end of April. If we were living in less chaotic times, we might be testing out a new Super variant of an Nvidia graphics card right about now, or seeing if we can squeeze it into an upgrade budget. Alas, it is 2026, there are no new cards, and you’re more likely to find an oil well than a cheap GPU. In fact the only new Nvidia card this calendar year just got announced as a side not in a driver update.
The card in question is a gently-updated variant of the RTX 5070 laptop GPU, this time with 12 gigabytes of GDDR7 memory instead of 8GB. That’s it, that’s all there is to it. This news comes as a single paragraph in an announcement post for the latest game-ready driver, wherein some tweaks for the re-release of a Conan survival-crafter from eight years ago were more headline-worthy. Please, try to contain your excitement.
The new variant of the 5070 is using 24 gigabit memory modules, which might be from Samsung or Micron. These will serve as “an additional pool of memory to complement the 16Gb G7 supply that currently ships with most GeForce GPUs.” To translate a bit of that supplier-speak: Some new manufacturing options might ease the supply crunch from the giant production black hole that is the “AI” market. It’s odd that Nvidia’s first move here is to go for a mid-range product, rather than offering more options at the desperate low end or trying to push for the more profitable high end.
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But the RTX 5070 is seen as something of a lame duck this GPU generation — pretty much everyone is reaching for the cheaper 5060 option or the 5070 Ti with 16GB of memory. And that’s for the desktop card which already has 12GB, while the laptop variant is a definite step down with 8GB. This little bump might offer a more affordable middle step. “Affordable” being a relative term, of course, because the cheapest laptop I can find with the current 8GB 5070 card starts at around $1300. That means you won’t find a 12GB variant below $1500, probably closer to $2000 when these laptops first hit the market in a few weeks or months.
Rumors had swirled that Nvidia was going to introduce RTX 50-series Super variants in 2026, as it did for the 40-series back in 2024. That didn’t happen, and it looks like the entire line might be canceled as Nvidia counts absolutely insane profits from selling data center and workstation GPUs. But to give Nvidia a break, AMD hasn’t announced anything new for the Radeon line since August of last year, and Intel’s entire third generation of consumer Arc cards might have just been poofed out of existence.
