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Safe to say, as we approach the midpoint of 2026, it hasn't exactly been a vintage year for GPU launches. We'll come to the details, but so far you're looking at a couple of very minor revisions of existing GPUs. And now comes a rumour that our only real hope for something slightly exciting this year has been punted out to 2027.
Yup, the latest word on Nvidia's on-again-off-again RTX 50 Super Series GPUs is that they won't appear until early 2027. As spotted by Videocardz, the usually well-informed Taiwanese website Benchlife says that although there were some previous indications of a late 2026 launch, their understanding is that the RTX 50 Super GPUs won't be seen until CES 2027 in January at the earliest.
So far in 2026, we've had the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE and the Nvidia RTX 5070 12 GB for laptops. The first is a revision of an existing GPU with slightly knocked-down specs, and the second merely an existing GPU with some more video memory—a chipset so momentous, Nvidia "launched" it by mentioning it as an aside in the release notes for a driver update.
One might point to the Intel Arc Pro B70. But that's a $1,000 AI GPU with the gaming performance of a $400 desktop graphics card. So, it's hard to see how it's relevant. And Nvidia's new RTX Spark is an APU with CPU cores, not a pure GPU. And, anyway, it's just a rebadge of the DGX Spark chip announced over a year ago and finally released in October.
As for the rest of the year, well, the AMD Radeon RX 9050 budget GPU is expected, but that's supposedly based on the same Navi 44 chip as the RX 9060 and RX 9060 XT. Beyond that, there's a purported Nvidia RTX 5050 9 GB, which again is a tweaked version of an existing GPU.
As we reported earlier today, AMD is now not expected to launch its next-gen RDNA 5 graphics chips until late 2027 or even 2028. And if Nvidia's revised RTX 50 Supers really do arrive early next year, it's hard to see how Nvidia's actual next-gen graphics architecture, Rubin, arrives any earlier than RDNA 5.
In other words, if the RTX 50 Supers come in early 2027, Nvidia is hardly going to replace them with brand-new Rubin just a couple of months later. All of which means that 2026 is almost certainly going to be incredibly slim pickings for new GPUs, and there's a chance 2027 mightn't be all that much better.
If AMD RDNA 4 and Nvidia Rubin do slip to 2028, then the best we can hope for is tweaks of existing GPUs, including the RTX 50 Super Series, in 2027.
All I can say is, props to you if you managed to bag an RTX 4090 at something close to its MSRP back when it launched in October 2022. Putting multi-frame gen to one side, it's otherwise still the second fastest GPU today. And it now looks likely that by the time something faster comes out, it will have been either the fastest or second fastest graphics card you can buy for six years or more. That's an incredible run.
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