It looks like the GPU industry might have two very, very quiet years (2026 and 2027) in store for us.
The least we can say is that 2026 won’t have been a great year for graphics card enthusiasts. So, yes, there are still a little over six months left to prove us wrong, but everything suggests… that won’t be the case. The massive demand from artificial intelligence for GPUs and DRAM has limited options, and while gamers are used to seeing graphics card prices drop after a year on the market, that’s clearly not the case today. On the contrary, the GeForce RTX 5080 on one side and the Radeon RX 9070 XT on the other are at their highest prices. On the NVIDIA side, things might change—a little—with the arrival of the hypothetical GeForce RTX 50 SUPER series, but that wouldn’t happen until early next year at the earliest.
The latest GPU roadmap officially presented by AMD: RDNA 5 isn’t even mentioned © AMD
Mind you, at AMD, the situation is even more drastic: it appears that the American company has no plans for any new RDNA 4 cards, even though the Radeon RX 9070 GRE has just been launched, and the next generation isn’t expected until the launch of the RDNA 5 cards—which clearly aren’t coming anytime soon. In fact, during Computex 2026, which just wrapped up, journalists from the Tweakers website were able to speak with several AMD partners. These are graphics card manufacturers who preferred to remain anonymous, but whose comments are unequivocal.
One partner, for example, explained that the first RDNA 5 GPUs are expected to arrive during the second or third quarter of 2027. Another partner is less optimistic and believes that the release of the new AMD GPUs won’t happen until the very end of 2027 or the beginning of the following year. This timeline seems more credible given the progress AMD has made and would, in fact, pit RDNA 5 against the Rubin generation—the GPU currently under development at NVIDIA to replace the Blackwell GPUs. The lull of 2026 is therefore expected to continue at least through the first two-thirds of 2027.
