The release of the rumoured Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 9GB is now up in the air, according to a regular hardware leaker, following a recent delay in launch plans. Instead, Nvidia will apparently press ahead with yet another resurrection of the ageing RTX 3060 12GB, which is expected to hit the market in a few months.
Whispers of an RTX 5050 9GB emerged earlier this year, as a refresh of sorts to the existing RTX 5050 8GB. Leaks suggest the 1GB upgrade would also come with faster 28Gb GDDR7 memory modules, compared to GDDR6 memory on the standard card, but at the expense of a narrower 96-bit memory bus. As such, total bandwidth would increase by a mere 16GB/s.
RTX 5050 9G is delayed, launch becomes pretty uncertain now. The newly produced RTX 3060 will fill the gap, ETA June 2026.
— MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) April 17, 2026
However, hardware leaker Zed__Wang (MEGAsizeGPU) says Nvidia now has cold feet about the idea of releasing a new RTX 5050. The leaker alleges that Nvidia hasn’t officially cancelled the card entirely, but suggests the prospect of it hitting store shelves is unclear.
While Zed__Wang doesn’t provide a reason for this rumoured delay, current DRAM pricing likely plays a significant role behind this business decision. I’m all the more certain of this likelihood, considering the company’s apparent plans to march the RTX 3060 12GB to market once again.
Launching over five years ago, the RTX 3060 uses older manufacturing nodes and slower GDDR6 VRAM modules. Both these characteristics theoretically make the graphics card cheaper to produce than a GDDR7-based 5050, while still offering a larger memory buffer and bandwidth (360GB/s) than a potential RTX 5050 9GB.
Of course, this comes at the expense of architectural improvements. The card’s GA106 Ampere GPU still has plenty to offer in modern games, but is undeniably slower than the cut-down GB206 that the rumoured RTX 5050 9GB would use. There would also be a notable lack of support for new DLSS 4.5 features, such as frame generation.
According to Zed__Wang, the RTX 3060 12GB will return sometime in June. That’s just in time for Computex 2026, but I highly doubt we’ll see Nvidia discuss plans to bring back the card during its press conference. It’s unlikely the company wants to run the risk of more GeForce egg on its face after the DLSS 5 backlash.
Check out my RTX 5060 review while we bide our time to see if the RTX 3060 12GB truly does make a comeback. For more graphics card chat, you can also give our best GPU guide a read.
