'Credible and reliable contacts' claim Nvidia is releasing an RTX 5090-beating GPU around September time this year
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.
But rumours of a super-high end RTX Blackwell card originally surfaced well before even the RTX 5090 had been released back in January last year. Though they came along with the suggestion that, like the proposed RTX 4090 Ti, it might never see the light of day. That was an Ada card which was specced out to the design stage, but then never actually found a release.
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.
The RTX 5090 itself doesn't use the full GB202 core, missing one entire GPC (graphics processing cluster), so I'd expect any RTX Blackwell Titan AI or RTX 5090 Ti to come with 24,064 CUDA cores (or maybe 24,576, if it's not directly cribbing from the RTX Pro 6000's chip) and 48 GB GDDR7.
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.
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.