The RTX 50-series has delivered a record-breaking $4.28B in gaming revenue for Nvidia... no matter what you think about VRAM levels, launch pricing, and availability

Although AI is absolutely the main focus of Nvidia right now, with Jen-Hsun now referring to it as "an AI infrastructure company", the green team hasn't forgotten about gaming. The launch of the RTX 50-series graphics cards this year has certainly been a boon for the company and accounts for a huge increase in gaming revenue.

The second quarter of Nvidia's fiscal year 2026 (or 2025 if you're not Nvidia) has seen a record $4.28 billion of revenue, which is 49% higher than the same period last year. The start of 2024 didn't see any major launches for GPUs, with the RTX 40-series cards rolling out from the latter half of 2022 to the middle of 2023.

For a longer term picture of what this stat means, Nvidia reported a gaming revenue of $1.83 billion in the final quarter of 2022 (Nvidia's Fiscal 2023. Yeah, it's a confusing system). This same quarter saw the launch of RTX 40-series laptops, as well as the RTX 4070 Ti. Prior to that, in Q3 of 2022, we'd only just seen the launch of the RTX 4090, and Nvidia reported a gaming revenue of $1.57 billion. Nvidia followed up with gaming revenue of $2.24 billion in Q1 fiscal 2024, as well as the launch of the RTX 4070. Finally, Q2 of fiscal 2024 saw a revenue of $2.49 billion, with the launch of both the RTX 4060 and the RTX 4060 Ti.

Where the RTX 30-series saw plenty of extra demand thanks to cryptominers, that was less viable, and less profitable by the time the RTX 40-series came around. By the start of 2022, crypto GPU sales had dropped off significantly. Though AI development had certainly long begun by this point, it was far less relevant to Nvidia's business model by this point. How times have changed.

The RTX 50-series launch, however, has seen the highest revenue for its gaming segment that Nvidia has ever had. AI still outweighs it from a data centre/enterprise perspective, with it almost being ten times the revenue in the latest earnings report, though. It is worth noting, however, that where this section in Nvidia's reports previously just said 'Gaming', it has said 'Gaming and AI PC' since the Q1 report for its fiscal year of 2024 instead.

Nvidia can't separately account for sales made on gaming tech that is not used for gaming, so obviously has to pool the two together. Those looking to run AI servers or rigs (like individual professionals, schools, etc) will likely buy the consumer-grade cards and put them into their own systems. In the gaming and AI PC section of the report, Nvidia cites its partnership with OpenAI to launch open-weight models for use in local AI on RTX GPUs, and local LLM usage is certainly growing.

It is worth noting that all of the RTX 50-series cards launched very close together, far closer than previous generations, and stock even finally appears to be stabilising. The first few months seemed like a desert in terms of graphics cards you could buy for a reasonable price, but GPUs, almost across the board, appear to be available for around MSRP. We've even seen the RTX 5090 drop down to its MSRP recently, and that's the first time that's happened in the US since launch. Nvidia has certainly managed to eventually deliver a good level of stock after launch, even if the launch itself was a frustrating mess.

Best graphics card 2025

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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