8 GB VRAM: still fine today, or already outdated? A look at the Legion Pro 5 16
Laptops equipped with an RTX 5070 start at around €1,500, though most configurations cost significantly more. At that price, buyers expect a system that will stay capable for years. Yet in Reddit threads and tech forums, many users argue that Nvidia’s 8 GB allocation could be too tight, potentially causing issues in certain games.
We took a closer look at the VRAM situation with the Lenovo Legion Pro 5 16IAX10 and tried to form a case-specific judgment — limited, of course, to this laptop model and a handful of game titles. A more in-depth article on the broader VRAM discussion is coming soon.
In most games, VRAM usage simply isn’t something you notice. There’s no visible counter, and we were able to play titles like Baldur’s Gate 3, GTA V, and Cyberpunk 2077 smoothly — even up to 4K — without any signs of memory bottlenecks.
Some titles, however, show a “VRAM budget” or similar indicator in their graphics settings. Depending on the chosen resolution and detail level, that bar fills up quickly. Assassin's Creed Shadows and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are two such examples.
In Assassin’s Creed Shadows at 2,560 x 1,440 (QHD), the game reports that the VRAM budget is exceeded by about 100 MB. In the following benchmark, though, frame times remain steady — even if the average frame rate hovers around 38 fps. The internal stutter count registers at just 1.
To stress the VRAM further, we switched to native 4K. Now, at least according to the indicator, VRAM demands exceed the limit by a fair margin — and we recorded a stutter count of 15. The problem here: we’re already down to an average of 21 fps at native 4K, which makes it hard to say whether the stuttering is really due to VRAM limits or simply the GPU struggling overall.
Switching from native 4K to DLSS Quality mode bumps the average back above 30 fps and drops the stutter count to 2 — again, despite the game still reporting a VRAM overage. In Full HD on High settings, the VRAM limit isn’t breached at all, the stutter count is 0, and performance averages 61 fps. In short, Assassin’s Creed Shadows isn’t the best test case for judging VRAM sufficiency, since performance constraints appear long before memory usage becomes a real issue. Therefore, it is also less of a problem.
Next, we looked at Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Here we saw a much clearer negative impact from the RTX 5070’s “just” 8 GB of VRAM: at a certain point, the game simply refused to start or crashed on launch. Even at Full HD and low settings, the game claims VRAM usage exceeds the limit — though in practice, we noticed no problems until stepping up to higher detail levels. Beyond that point, the game crashes every time it tries to boot (each settings change requires a restart).
That said, Indiana Jones is a bit of a special case. As our colleague Florian put it during his game benchmark article, the game is in “a questionable technical state” and “poorly optimized, making its VRAM demands unjustified.” Even GPUs with 16 GB of VRAM suffer severe frame rate drops. But then you can at least start the game in higher resolutions and settings.
Conclusion: rarely a problem, but a real limitation exists
So, back to our original question — are 8 GB of VRAM too little? For most current games, the answer is no. The few exceptions we’ve found seem more like cases of sloppy optimization rather than genuine hardware limitations. Still, those games do exist, and owners of 8 GB GPUs will likely hit trouble at certain resolutions and settings, while users with more VRAM can continue playing. Waiting for patches is the only fix — assuming they ever arrive. And given that future titles will likely demand even more VRAM, the concern isn’t entirely unfounded.
As mentioned earlier, this conclusion applies specifically to the Legion Pro 5 16 and should be seen as a general indication rather than a definitive statement. A more comprehensive analysis with deeper benchmarks and comparisons is coming soon.
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