The recent restock of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) led to a touch of chaos at one Micro Center store in Dallas, Texas a few days ago. A long queue - or perhaps more accurately, a heaving mass of people - along with a small stampede were the orders of the day.
One attendee filmed the moment the doors of the store were opened to the eager shoppers, and watching it will no doubt leave you feeling a strange combination of awe, and embarrassment for humanity.
Many PC gamers all over the world have been feeling hard done by recently thanks to the pesky semiconductor shortage currently plaguing the world, which indirectly comes courtesy of the actual plague that's still plaguing the world. The pandemic has negatively impacted the production of semiconductors, and in turn, of GPUs.
There has also been a surge in demand for top-of-the-range GPUs from the cryptocurrency market, whose miners require enhanced processing power to do their diggin'. Nvidia has even had to introduce crypto hash limiters into their future GPUs to try discourage crypto-miners from snapping up every GPU they come across, so that there are some left for the lowly gamers out there. Basically, the world has been real thirsty for some new GPUs to populate store shelves.
Then came Nvidia's announcement earlier this week, which revealed the RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti, two highly-anticipated upgraded versions of the current RTX 3080 and 3070 GPUs. The 3080 Ti launched on Thursday this week, boasting a hefty price tag of $1199, which is thought to reflect the high demand and current shortage of silicon chips more so than its actual improvement of performance over the 3080. The price certainly didn't deter the folks in this video, though.
Hopefully there weren't too many similar scenes at other stores upon the GPU's launch this week, as clearly there's every chance that someone could get properly injured. Perhaps something like handing out tickets to customers beforehand - like what Best Buy did - would go a long way in the future. At this point, though, it seems like literally any attempt at crowd management would have been better than whatever happened here.
Source: YouTube