The flagship smartphone race has become a little too polite, especially when it comes to mobile photography. There was a time when the conversation revolved around megapixel counts, sensor count, and wild zoom numbers. But over the last few years, that energy has cooled.
The biggest brands no longer behave like they are trying to shock the market. Companies like Apple and Samsung now focus more on refining image processing and fine-tuning the formula than on pushing camera hardware into genuinely outrageous territory.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Then a phone like the Oppo Find X9 Ultra shows up and reminds you what old-school flagship ambitions used to look like.
And yes, it is as ridiculous as it sounds. There are not one, but two 200MP cameras here. The phone packs a 200MP main camera, a 200MP 3x telephoto, a 50MP 10x optical telephoto, and a 50MP ultrawide, all wrapped in Hasselblad branding and a camera-first design that only adds to the whole overkill appeal.
Excitement is an expensive commodity now, and the Find X9 Ultra is loaded
The Oppo Find X9 Ultra lands as unapologetically excessive in a market that has become increasingly careful. This is the first phone to bring back a 10x optical zoom since the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. And the best part is that you are not sacrificing shorter zoom performance either, because Oppo also throws in a massive 200MP 3x telephoto. This is one of the most aggressive hardware plays we have seen in smartphone photography in years.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Apple and Samsung still make reliable camera phones. Their flagships are built around consistency, broad appeal, and careful decision-making. Oppo’s phone feels like it was built by people who simply wanted more. More character, more hardware, and more of a reason to get excited. The Hasselblad tuning, the special filters, and the overall shooting experience all push it closer to the feel of using an actual camera instead of just another polished flagship phone.
Add in the accessories, and the phone just becomes absurdly cool. Oppo built an entire Hasselblad Earth Explorer Kit around the idea that this phone should behave like a real camera. With the Oppo Hasselblad 300mm Explorer Teleconverter attachment, the 3x telephoto turns into a 300mm equivalent focal length, which works out to roughly 13x optical zoom.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
This is what we’re missing
Would I like every flagship phone to come with this kind of camera ambition? Absolutely. Is that realistic? Probably not. And honestly, it does not need to be.
Oppo clearly built this for enthusiasts. But after using the Find X9 Pro, one thing that really stood out to me about these camera-first phones is the experience they create. It starts with one quick shot, and before long, you are taking pictures of everything around you. You start noticing light differently. You start framing ordinary things like they matter more.
And the brand understands this.
Oppo acts like smartphone photography has room for obsession. Room for niche advantages. Room for a phone that goes harder on zoom, harder on sensor size, and harder on sheer camera bravado than the mainstream brands are willing to attempt.
It definitely won’t click with everyone, but the magic is there if you’re willing to try. The Find X9 Ultra feels ambitious, a little unreasonable, and fully committed to the idea that flagship photography should still feel like a race.
As I’m writing this, NVIDIA is the largest company in the world, with a market cap exceeding $4 trillion. Team Green is now the leader among the Magnificent Seven of the tech world, having surpassed them all in just a few short years.
The company has managed to reach these incredible heights with smart planning and by making the right moves for decades, the latest being the decision to sell shovels during the AI gold rush. Considering the current hardware landscape, there’s simply no reason for NVIDIA to rush a new gaming GPU generation for at least a few years. Here’s why.
Scarcity has become the new normal
Not even Nvidia is powerful enough to overcome market constraints
Global memory shortages have been a reality since late 2025, and they aren’t just affecting RAM and storage manufacturers. Rather, this impacts every company making any product that contains memory or storage—including graphics cards.
Since NVIDIA sells GPU and memory bundles to its partners, which they then solder onto PCBs and add cooling to create full-blown graphics cards, this means that NVIDIA doesn’t just have to battle other tech giants to secure a chunk of TSMC’s limited production capacity to produce its GPU chips. It also has to procure massive amounts of GPU memory, which has never been harder or more expensive to obtain.
While a company as large as NVIDIA certainly has long-term contracts that guarantee stable memory prices, those contracts aren’t going to last forever. The company has likely had to sign new ones, considering the GPU price surge that began at the beginning of 2026, with gaming graphics cards still being overpriced.
With GPU memory costing more than ever, NVIDIA has little reason to rush a new gaming GPU generation, because its gaming earnings are just a drop in the bucket compared to its total earnings.
NVIDIA is an AI company now
Gaming GPUs are taking a back seat
Credit: appeconomyinsights.com
NVIDIA’s gaming division had been its golden goose for decades, but come 2022, the company’s data center and AI division’s revenue started to balloon dramatically. By the beginning of fiscal year 2023, data center and AI revenue had surpassed that of the gaming division.
In fiscal year 2026 (which began on July 1, 2025, and ends on June 30, 2026), NVIDIA’s gaming revenue has contributed less than 8% of the company’s total earnings so far. On the other hand, the data center division has made almost 90% of NVIDIA’s total revenue in fiscal year 2026. What I’m trying to say is that NVIDIA is no longer a gaming company—it’s all about AI now.
Considering that we’re in the middle of the biggest memory shortage in history, and that its AI GPUs rake in almost ten times the revenue of gaming GPUs, there’s little reason for NVIDIA to funnel exorbitantly priced memory toward gaming GPUs. It’s much more profitable to put every memory chip they can get their hands on into AI GPU racks and continue receiving mountains of cash by selling them to AI behemoths.
The RTX 50 Super GPUs might never get released
A sign of times to come
NVIDIA’s RTX 50 Super series was supposed to increase memory capacity of its most popular gaming GPUs. The 16GB RTX 5080 was to be superseded by a 24GB RTX 5080 Super; the same fate would await the 16GB RTX 5070 Ti, while the 18GB RTX 5070 Super was to replace its 12GB non-Super sibling. But according to recent reports, NVIDIA has put it on ice.
The RTX 50 Super launch had been slated for this year’s CES in January, but after missing the show, it now looks like NVIDIA has delayed the lineup indefinitely. According to a recent report, NVIDIA doesn’t plan to launch a single new gaming GPU in 2026. Worse still, the RTX 60 series, which had been expected to debut sometime in 2027, has also been delayed.
A report by The Information (via Tom’s Hardware) states that NVIDIA had finalized the design and specs of its RTX 50 Super refresh, but the RAM-pocalypse threw a wrench into the works, forcing the company to “deprioritize RTX 50 Super production.” In other words, it’s exactly what I said a few paragraphs ago: selling enterprise GPU racks to AI companies is far more lucrative than selling comparatively cheaper GPUs to gamers, especially now that memory prices have been skyrocketing.
Before putting the RTX 50 series on ice, NVIDIA had already slashed its gaming GPU supply by about a fifth and started prioritizing models with less VRAM, like the 8GB versions of the RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti, so this news isn’t that surprising.
So when can we expect RTX 60 GPUs?
Late 2028-ish?
Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek
The good news is that the RTX 60 series is definitely in the pipeline, and we will see it sooner or later. The bad news is that its release date is up in the air, and it’s best not to even think about pricing. The word on the street around CES 2026 was that NVIDIA would release the RTX 60 series in mid-2027, give or take a few months. But as of this writing, it’s increasingly likely we won’t see RTX 60 GPUs until 2028.
If you’ve been following the discussion around memory shortages, this won’t be surprising. In late 2025, the prognosis was that we wouldn’t see the end of the RAM-pocalypse until 2027, maybe 2028. But a recent statement by SK Hynix chairman (the company is one of the world’s three largest memory manufacturers) warns that the global memory shortage may last well into 2030.
If that turns out to be true, and if the global AI data center boom doesn’t slow down in the next few years, I wouldn’t be surprised if NVIDIA delays the RTX 60 GPUs as long as possible. There’s a good chance we won’t see them until the second half of 2028, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they miss that window as well if memory supply doesn’t recover by then. Data center GPUs are simply too profitable for NVIDIA to reserve a meaningful portion of memory for gaming graphics cards as long as shortages persist.
At least current-gen gaming GPUs are still a great option for any PC gamer
If there is a silver lining here, it is that current-gen gaming GPUs (NVIDIA RTX 50 and AMD Radeon RX 90) are still more than powerful enough for any current AAA title. Considering that Sony is reportedly delaying the PlayStation 6 and that global PC shipments are projected to see a sharp, double-digit decline in 2026, game developers have little incentive to push requirements beyond what current hardware can handle.
DLSS 5, on the other hand, may be the future of gaming, but no one likes it, and it will take a few years (and likely the arrival of the RTX 60 lineup) for it to mature and become usable on anything that’s not a heckin’ RTX 5090.
If you’re open to buying used GPUs, even last-gen gaming graphics cards offer tons of performance and are able to rein in any AAA game you throw at them. While we likely won’t get a new gaming GPU from NVIDIA for at least a few years, at least the ones we’ve got are great today and will continue to chew through any game for the foreseeable future.
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