While console players have been drooling over every little bit and piece of news about next generation consoles, PC players have been going through something similar with the latest reveals of the GeForce RTX graphics cards from Nvidia. The hype was through the roof for the things, especially the new flagship card, the RTX 3080. But it seems as that hype went beyond what Nvidia could provide, at least for 2020.
The pre-orders for the 3080 sold out in minutes, and Nvidia even preemptively apologized for similar issues that would probably arise with the 3090, which did see a repeat. If you’re hoping to get your hands on these this year, well, unfortunately it looks like that isn’t going to be an easy task without going through pricey resellers and scalpers. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke at a Q&A at the company’s GTC announcements. There he revealed that demand far exceeded what the company was expecting, and said they did not see their supply keeping up for the reminder of 2020 (thanks to Tom’s Hardware for transcribing the talk).
“I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year,” Huang said, “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 top of that the ‘Ampere holiday factor,’ and we’re going to have a really really big Q4 season.
“The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue. 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.”
As it stands, technically both the RTX 3080 and 3090 are available, but out of stock everywhere, and it seems stock that is left will most likely sell out quickly. A more budget friendly card, the RTX 3070, is also scheduled to be released sometime next year.
