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Nvidia released its Q2 2027 earnings report yesterday, and while it’s obvious the company is making a ton of money on data centers – up 106% from this time last year – the company didn’t mention gaming once.
That shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, Team Green dropped the gaming category from its earnings report last quarter, moving it into ‘edge computing.’ In that category thisquarter, the only time ‘RTX’ shows up is when the RTX Spark, launched at Computex 2026, was mentioned. I’ve had the chance to play with the RTX Spark-equipped Surface a couple times at events since then, and while it’s definitely capable of gaming, systems with that chipset are absolutely geared more toward local AI workloads than playing Alan Wake 2.
At least part of the reason gaming wasn’t mentioned, I suspect, is because we’re smack dab in the middle of a GPU generation right now. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 and the rest of the Blackwell GeForce lineup came out about a year and a half ago, so it makes sense that gaming is a bit quiet. But, with how much cash AI is making Nvidia, and with the RAM crisis – which Nvidia absolutely contributes to – driving graphics card prices through the roof, I can’t help but wonder when we’re going to actually see new GPUs.
I’ve seen rumors that the RTX 6080 likely won’t be launching until the end of 2027 at the earliest, which, if true, would make this one of the longest graphics generations in memory. As early as February 2026, a report from The Information suggested the RTX 60 series would be delayed beyond 2027, and we still haven’t got the mid-generation ‘Super’ refresh that we typically see halfway through each graphics generation.
Instead, most of the gaming news out of Nvidia this year has been around software. The company previewed the controversial DLSS 5 back in March, which will use gen AI to essentially re-draw games. But even beyond that, the company just released a new ray reconstruction model as part of DLSS 4.5, which is genuinely awesome, and there have been incremental upgrades to multi-frame generationthroughout the year that have made that technology much less jarring.
At the end of the day, I’m not sure if it’s a bad thing if new graphics cards take a while to actually come out. If there’s one thing that rings true about pretty much every hardware launch this year, it’s that they’ve been overpriced due to the RAM shortage. Nvidia’s cards have carried a higher premium with every launch, so it’s hard to imagine just how expensive a flagship graphics card launching in 2026 or 2027 would actually be.
My advice, then, would be to brace yourself for a few more years without an upgrade. Hopefully game developers will use this time to make sure games run a bit smoother on older hardware. The good news is that some of the best games this year have been successful there, like Crimson Desert and Forza Horizon 6, which run well on basically anything. But there are still games like Star Wars Zero Company and Halo: Campaign Evolvedwhich all but demand newer GPUs. Hopefully, we see more of the former than the latter in the jam-packed second half of 2026.
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
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