NVIDIA CEO Says Intense GeForce RTX 3080/3090 Demand Will Outstrip Supply Through 2020
"The demand issue is that it is much greater than we expected - and we expected really a lot." That's a serious bummer considering that the initial supply of GeForce RTX 3080 cards was depleted within a few minutes when it launched on September 17th. Even after NVIDIA and its partners implemented some failsafe checks to thwart bots and verify that legitimates orders were being placed, the GeForce RTX 3090 was also met with an immediate sellout at launch.
Huang went on to say that it's been well over a decade since we've seen such a run on a new tech item that's been released, and likened the madness surrounding the GeForce RTX 30 Series to the launch of Windows 95 or the original Intel Pentium processor. He added that there was no way to have predicted this intense demand, and if it did, it would have not been "possible to have ramped that fast."
Late last month, NVIDIA VP Of Technical Marketing Tony Tamasi previewed today’s comments from Huang, stating, “Demand almost regardless of what we did was going to exceed our supply." This was despite the fact that NVIDIA actually had more Ampere supply available at launch than any of its previous GPU launches (i.e. Turing, Pascal, Maxwell, etc.).
“So, it wasn’t a case that we didn’t build any, and it wasn’t a case that our add-in card guys didn’t have supply either," said Tamasi during our September 24th Two And A Half Geeks broadcast. "I just think that the demand was enormous.”
We guess that it's a good problem to have for NVIDIA -- to see such off-the-charts demand for a new product -- but gamers have been incensed about the launches of both the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090. Virtually no retailer has the cards in stock at the moment, and scalpers that managed to get their hands on cards are selling them at huge markups on third-party marketplaces like eBay.
NVIDIA has already acknowledged the problem, and it has taken steps to lessen any potential issues with the upcoming GeForce RTX 3070. The GeForce RTX 3070 was originally supposed to launch on October 15th, but NVIDIA delayed the launch by two weeks. "Production of GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards are ramping quickly,” NVIDIA stated in blog post last week. “We’ve heard from many of you that there should be more cards available on launch day. To help make that happen, we are updating the availability date to Thursday, October 29th.”
Will gamers be more successful in getting their hands on the $499 GeForce RTX 3070? We're not so sure, given that it will deliver GeForce RTX 2080 Ti-class performance at $499, and will surely be a hot ticket this holiday season as well.
