If you’re looking at getting a GeForce 3080 before the end of the year, we’ve got some bad news for you. Even the CEO of Nvidia doesn’t think that they’re going to produce enough video cards to meet the holiday demand.
"I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year," Huang told reporters at Nvidia’s annual GTC conference during a Q&A session. "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."
In this case, the "Ampere Factor" refers to Nvidia's new Ampere GPU architecture that goes to the nanometer scale and requires sophisticated new manufacturing techniques. But even with the more difficult to produce graphics cards, Huang insists that getting them into the hands of eager PC gamers is less an issue of supply and more an issue of overwhelming demand.
"The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected — and we expected really a lot," Huang added. "Even if we knew about all the demand, I don't think it's possible to have ramped that fast. We're ramping really, really hard. Yields are great, the product's shipping fantastically, it's just getting sold out instantly.
"I appreciate it very much, I just don't think there's a real problem to solve. It's a phenomenon to observe. It's just a phenomenon."
Upon release, the hotly anticipated GeForce RTX 3080 was sold out even before some customers could even load a retailer’s website. And as expected, scalpers and those looking for a quick buck were quick to try and re-sell the RTX 3080 on eBay for a profit. Thankfully, PC gamers stymied their plans by making fake eBay ads that made it harder for potential buyers to even find a second-hand 3080 online.
Nvidia recently announced that they’d delay the release of the even more hotly anticipated GeForce RTX 3070 by two weeks in order to ramp up production and ensure that retailers have more units on hand, but with even more demand than the 3080, it seems hardly possible that everyone who wants an RTX 3070 will get one on October 29.
Source: Tom’s Hardware