If you want to purchase an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 or 3090 before 2020 ends, you will have to watch retail websites permanently and keep refreshing like mad, unfortunately.
Tom’s Hardware reports that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang admitted that the demand for graphics cards this year was far above the predicted numbers, which is why they are so hard to obtain for the moment.
Hard To Acquire
Demand was already high, but NVIDIA expects it to skyrocket as the holiday shopping season is upon us.
Huang said:
“I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through 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 top of that the ‘Ampere holiday factor,’ and we’re going to have a really really big Q4 season.”
By “Ampere,” Huang referred to NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture.
The RTX 3080 is the company’s first Ampere GPU, promising significant improvements around real-time ray tracing.
The card’s launch produced tremendous excitement, so much that the official website crashed soon after launch, and all the available 3080 sold out rapidly.
The company apologized for not being prepared for such an “unprecedented” demand.
The company apologized one more time before pre-orders for the RTX 3090 even began, knowing too well that it won’t manage to meet demand because of the limited supply it had on day one.
The company also delayed the launch of the $499 RTX 3070, so they could stock up on the card to avoid a repeat of the 3080 and 3090 scenarios.
Huang noted that there is a demand problem, not a supply one:
“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 Windows 95 and Pentium’s old days 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.”
