Nvidia recently launched the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 Ampere lineup of GPUs, but the launch was plagued with stock availability issues since day one. NVIDIA has also delayed the GeForce RTX 3070 GPU launch by two weeks to October 29th.
Many were hoping to purchase these cards, but it was just another paper launch. The RTX 3080 stocks were sold out immediately within few minutes at several retailers across the US, UK and Europe. Some Major e-tailers also experienced extremely high wave of traffic, and this brought their entire website down as well.
Even NVIDIA’s official store had an issue where people couldn’t finish their purchase, after adding the item to the shopping cart. Many customers claim that the listings disappeared in 15 seconds, and cards sold out before the Add to Cart button even worked for them. The stock immediately depleted, almost as if there was no stock at all to begin with. NVIDIA also issued an official statement regarding the RTX 3080 GPU’s stock availability at launch day.
Now in a recent Q&A session at the 2020 GTC Digital event NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang confirmed that the GeForce RTX 3090/3080 Ampere GPU shortages are likely to be expected until 2021, coming via Tom’s Hardware:
“I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply throughout the year. Remember, we’re also going into the double-whammy, the double-whammy is the holiday season. Even before the holiday season we were doing incredibly well, and then you add on top of it, the Ampere factor, and then you add on the Ampere holiday factor, and we’re going to have a really really big Q4 season.” – Jensen Huang.
“The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue,” said Huang, “The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected – and we expected really a lot.”
“Retailers will tell you they haven’t seen a phenomenon like this in over a decade of computing. It hearkens back to the old days of Windows 95 and Pentium when people were just out of their minds to buy this stuff. So this is a phenomenon like we’ve not seen in a long time, and we just weren’t prepared for it.”
“Even if we knew about all the demand, I don’t think it’s possible to have ramped that fast. We’re ramping really really hard. Yields are great, the product’s shipping fantastically, it’s just getting sold out instantly,” said Huang.”I appreciate it very much, I just don’t think there’s a real problem to solve. It’s a phenomenon to observe. It’s just a phenomenon.”
Nvidia CEO: GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 Shortages To Last Until 2021 https://t.co/nhn0LwqTfD pic.twitter.com/lpvQTZoFiU
— Tom's Hardware (@tomshardware) October 5, 2020
Jensen Huang said that the issue is more to do with the demand rather than supply, and emphasized demand as the most major factor. Several China-based media outlets have already predicted before that the shortages would last until 2021, and TweakTown’s Anthony Garreffa also reported before that no stock will be available till the end of this year.
It seems this year it would be hard to purchase a new NVIDIA Ampere-based flagship graphics card. Recently, Gigabyte AORUS’s newly launched RTX 3080 Master custom graphics card saw a similar fate where despite Newegg implementing new measures to counter bots couldn’t stop the scalpers from getting them before actual customers.
The cards were quickly listed on eBay and there was a lot of drama surrounding the whole launch as reported by Wccftech. This whole situation doesn’t look good for the RTX 3070 GPU launch either, since we can expect the demand to be even greater than the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards, given this is a mainstream budget GPU costing around 499 USD.
Meanwhile, some manufacturers/AIBs have also been providing daily updates on social media outlets and forums, apologizing for the delay in availability of these Ampere cards. This GeForce RTX 30-series launch has seen an excessive demand, with several retailers fighting over each shipment to fulfill their pre-orders. What’s even worse is that a lot of the RTX 3080 graphics cards didn’t even ship to gamers, because scalpers purchased these graphics card in bulk to sell them for profit elsewhere. Scalpers were demanding anywhere from $1000 to $2000+ USD for these cards on EBay.
The company has promised to implement more security measures to combat people buying cards using bots, and they also plan to implement CAPTCHA. This whole Ampere GPU launch appears to be a mess right now, with gamers and customers criticizing Nvidia for poorly managing the situation.
The company has already cancelled several orders which were placed using BOTS. This is definitely one of the most broken launch events ever witnessed for a flagship graphics card which indeed had a huge demand, but unfortunately, this has created much unrest in the gaming community.
Stay tuned for more!
Hello, my name is NICK Richardson. I’m an avid PC and tech fan since the good old days of RIVA TNT2, and 3DFX interactive “Voodoo” gaming cards. I love playing mostly First-person shooters, and I’m a die-hard fan of this FPS genre, since the good ‘old Doom and Wolfenstein days.
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