Last week’s launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 was a bit of a mess. There were no pre-orders and stock for the next-generation graphics card were snapped up across U.S. and U.K. retailers very fast, with the GPU then popping up on eBay for stupidly high prices.
Nvidia realised it dropped the ball on the RTX 3080’s launch and has posted an apology for the process. It also noted that retailers will get more stock and to use its “product finder” tool to search for retailers with the RTX 3080 in stock.
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We’ve struggled to find any retailers with the RTX 3080 in stock, so it looks like you’ll need to be a bit patient while stocks are replenished. Or you could go and pre-order the Xbox Series X and Series S while you wait.
“The GeForce RTX 3080 is in full production. We began shipping GPUs to our partners in August, and have been increasing the supply weekly,” Nvidia said. “Partners are also ramping up capacity to meet the unprecedented demand. We understand that many gamers are unable to buy a GeForce RTX 3080 right now and we are doing everything we can to catch up quickly.
“We have great supply - just not for this level of demand. It is typical for initial demand to exceed supply for our new GPUs. Our global network of partners are ramping as hard as they can to get the new GPUs to the more than 100 million GeForce gamers around the world.”
Nvidia did note that when the RTX 3080 went on sale a lot of bots and resellers jumped on its website snapping up the new graphics card before others could. Nvidia moved to cancel these malicious orders and now has more processes in place to curtail such dodgy buyers. But bots and resellers aside, Nvidia did note that when sales of the RTX 3080 went live its own online store was swamped with more than 10 times the traffic of the launch of the GeForce RTX 2000-series graphics cards.
“We expected the best ever demand for the [RTX 3000-series], but the enthusiasm was overwhelming. We were not prepared for this level, nor were our partners. We apologize for this,” Nvidia said.
In short, the RTX 3080 proved to be too popular for its own good. But at least there’s work going on in the background to replenish stock and safeguard it from people trying to grab an RTX 3080 just to sell it on.
Nvidia's very high-end GeForce RTX 3090 is launching on September 24, so Nvidia will need to make sure it gets the launch of this graphics card right so it doesn’t see irritated fans turn to the upcoming AMD Big Navi graphics card instead.
