If you had every intention to grab yourself an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card this month, chances are you’re going to have to pay a premium for it. According to reports, the GPU maker has already ceased production of its card, and whatever units are left on the market are going fast.
News of the GTX 1080 Ti’s dwindling stock was first broken by Gamers Nexus, who specifies that NVIDIA had reportedly pulled production of the Pascal-based GTX 1080 Ti some time ago. By putting the card out of production, it’s quite clear that the company is attempting to steer the consumer’s direction towards the next best alternative to the GTX 1080 Ti – The GeForce RTX 2080.
As you would expect from the gaming community, NVIDIA’s decision hasn’t gone down smoothly, and with good reason. On paper, the RTX 2080 outperforms the GTX 1080 Ti by a meagre margin. On top of that, the cheapest RTX 2080 on the market currently sells for RM3699, while a brand new GTX 1080 Ti is currently being sold for less than RM3200.
There’s also the recent issue of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards dying on some users due to what some reports say is due to “faulty” GDDR6 memory chips provided by Micron in its manufacturing process. That could deter consumers from buying an RTX series graphics card at the current moment. However, the issue so far seems to be isolated to the RTX 2080 Ti, and doesn’t seem to have affected the RTX 2080 or RTX 2070.
In any case, if you’re still planning on getting a GTX 1080 Ti off the shelf, don’t be too surprised if resellers and PC shops have hiked up the price of the card. Of course, you can always turn to the second-hand GPU market as an alternative. But you’ll still need to be cautious, as GTX 1080 Ti being sold on this market may have been used as for non-gaming purposes (i.e. crypto mining). Prior to being sold off.
(Source: Gamers Nexus via Forbes / Video source: Gamers Hexus via YouTube)
