A concatenation of factors has rendered high-powered GPUs, like the Nvidia RTX 3090, incredibly hard to find unless you're willing to spend far more than MSRP. And it seems Nvidia expects little to change for most of this year.
On Monday, the GPU maker informed investors of better-than-expected earnings across the board in its first fiscal quarter and predicted that demand for its products will outstrip supply for most of the year. The company told investors that stock of high-end GPUs will remain scarce for some time.
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"Overall demand remains very strong and continues to exceed supply while our channel inventories remain quite lean," Nvidia CFO Colette Kress stated in a message to investors. "We expect demand to continue to exceed supply for much of this year. We believe we will have sufficient supply to support sequential growth beyond Q1."
So while Nvidia expects to release enough GPUs into the market to continue its earnings growth, it seems likely that we shouldn't expect high-end Nvidia cards like the GeForce RTX 30 series to get any easier to find for the foreseeable future.
That's in line with reports we heard months ago that online retailers, like Alternate, were expecting the GeForce RTX 30 series stock disaster to get worse before it gets better. This is due in large part to materials shortages and temporary factory shutdowns due to Chinese New Year.
Factor in the increased demand that both Nvidia and rival AMD have reported for their high-end graphics cards during the ongoing global pandemic, and you have a recipe for slim picking on the GPU front for months to come.
That said, there are still ways to get your hands on a powerful new graphics card if you're willing to dive into the churn of stock drops across online and brick-and-mortar retailers. We've done our best to put together regularly-updated guides to where to buy the Nvidia RTX 3090, where to buy the Nvidia RTX 3080 and how to get your hands on the Nvidia RTX 3070. If you're more interested in an AMD card, check out our updated guide on where to buy the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT.
