You might find it difficult to get an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 until 2021, as Nvidia’s CEO has said stock shortages will carry on into next year.
Jensen Huang, who founded Nvidia, said that that demand for the $699 RTX 3080 and the very expensive $1,499 RTX 3090 has been so high that graphics card manufacturers can’t keep up. And with the holiday season looming, that demand isn’t likely to let up any time soon.
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"I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year," Huang said at a Q&A at Nvidia's GTC conferences, Tom’s Hardware reported. "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."
This is bad news for people planning to make a new Nvidia-based gaming PC this fall. We’ve struggled to find any retailers that have the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 in stock.
That’s not hugely surprising, as the RTX 3080 is offering a huge amount of power for less than the $999 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the one time GPU champion for Team Green. And with improved ray-tracing support, which is set to become more prolific thanks to the PS5 and Xbox Series X also supporting it, the RTX 3080 is a rather appealing GPU.
The RTX 3090 might seem like overkill for most people. But we imagine it’s selling out due to frustrated Nvidia fans opting to get the more powerful graphics card as they couldn't get an RTX 3080; PC gamers can be a diehard lot.
All this will come as good news for AMD, which has its “Nvidia-killer” Big Navi graphics card in the works to challenge the RTX 3080, as well as the new Radeon RX 6000 series, due to be revealed October 28 and likely aimed at battling the GeForce RTX 3070. If AMD can deliver powerful graphics cards at prices that undercut Nvidia, as well as having plenty of cards in stock, it could hold a winning card this fall.
Desperate demand
So why is Nvidia struggling to have enough next-generation graphics card for eager fans? Huang explained that Nvidia’s stock shortages aren’t down to failure to make enough RTX 3080 cards, but down to the vast demand.
"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."
Nvidia has held back the launch of the RTX 3070 to ensure it has more stock to meet a predicted high demand when it arrives on October 29. But we’d also expect that graphics card to sell out rather fast as well, given it’s offering a lot of power for $499.
