'Credible and reliable contacts' claim Nvidia is releasing an RTX 5090-beating GPU around September time this year

Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card on different backgrounds

(Image credit: Future)

French tech outfit, Overclocking (via Videocardz), claims to have "direct, credible, and reliable contacts" which have noted that a very high-end RTX 50-series graphics card is on the way for the third quarter of 2026. That would mean sometime around September we could expect to see either an RTX Blackwell Titan AI card or a GeForce RTX 5090 Ti arrive in the shops.

Now, I'll admit, this all sounds rather fanciful. Having any confidence in such a graphics card being released just after the summer this year, for a 'Back to School' period (for all those very well-heeled students, I guess) feels like a stretch. Especially as the other recent GPU rumours have suggested any hint of an RTX 50-series Super range being indefinitely delayed and that a potential RTX Rubin generation of cards has been pushed back to 2028.

There have been no specs hinted at from Overclocking's contacts—which reportedly stretch across different countries, working in different companies—but it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect this to basically just be an RTX Pro 6000 card with half the memory and support for both Gaming and Creator driver lines.

Nvidia RTX Blackwell GPU architecture — (Image credit: Nvidia)

So, why isn't this just wishful thinking from a tech market desperate for new graphics card releases in a year that otherwise looks devoid of new GPUs?

The general thinking around graphics cards this year can basically be boiled down to, 'oh shit, memory's expensive.' And that then translates into a whole lot of 8 GB cards sticking around while the lower-end 16 GB versions get effectively canned.

There was a lot of noise about a potential end-of-life status around the RTX 5070 Ti, which everyone has essentially refuted, from the AIBs to Nvidia. Though the reality is that you're not going to find those cards for anything near MSRP if you can find them at all. They are effectively hitting some kind of temporary EoL status right now.

Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti graphics card — (Image credit: Future)

The same is expected for the 16 GB version of the RTX 5060 Ti, with Nvidia's focus switching to the RTX 5080 with its 16 GB frame buffer and now frankly offensive price tag.

But none of that suggests there's space for an even more expensive Nvidia GPU this side of 2027. Except you can look at the now $4,000 RTX 5090 and that RTX Pro 6000, with its 96 GB of GDDR7 ECC memory and $9,000+ price tag, and think, 'you know what, there's room there for a $5,000 - 6,000 RTX Blackwell Titan AI with half that memory.'

Yeah, essentially, I can see this happening. But it's certainly not good news for PC gamers, and just gives Nvidia and partners a way to make a whole bunch of money out of the same GB202 Pro chip but with half the VRAM expense.

Best graphics card 2026

1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070

2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB

3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570

4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090

👉Check out our full graphics card guide👈

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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

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