If you were planning on getting yourself an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 before the end of the year, you may find yourself disappointed. According to Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the ongoing shortages of its new Ampere-powered graphics card could continue well into next year.
The revelation of NVIDIA’s crippling shortage was made by Huang during a Q&A session that took place after its GTC 2020 keynote. The topic popped up, inevitably, during the session, and Huang’s response was a little surprising. According to him, the shortage of cards was caused, not by a shortfall in supply, but rather an “abundance of demand”.
To say that NVIDIA’s launch of its GeForce RTX 30 series was off to a rocky start is a mild understatement. Almost immediately after the RTX 3080’s launch last month, almost all existing stock – Founders Edition and AiB partners’ cards alike – were snatched up by bots and scalpers almost instantly. The latter then proceeding to resell them at cutthroat prices online and from the persecution of the masses.
NVIDIA’s shortage woes also aren’t helped by the delay of its RTX 3070; originally scheduled for a 15 October launch, the GPU brand pushed back the date by two weeks to 29 October. Prior to that, some of its AiB partners’ custom-cooled RTX 3080 cards were reportedly suffering stability issues, allegedly brought on by the use of specific capacitor types, but that was sorted out with a subsequent driver release.
To compound matters even further, NVIDIA’s rival, AMD, will finally be throwing its ray-tracing capable, Big Navi, Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards into the ring, giving consumers another alternative to Team Green’s offerings.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
