NVIDIA Has Us Hopeful You Might Actually Be Able To Buy A Graphics Card This Year
It feels like cruel irony that around the time PC gaming began to experience a resurgence, the availability of graphics cards fell by the wayside. The pandemic combined with new product launches (including new generation consoles that essentially run on PC hardware) and a global shortage came in like a perfectly frustrating storm. Toss into the mix scalpers and cryptocurrency mining, and there was no way 2021 was going to be anything but frustrating. Will 2022 be any better?
It's way too early for us to know for sure, being that we're only halfway through the first of 12 months. But if it is optimism you're after, you need only check out comments made by NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress during the 24th Annual Needham Growth Conference. Kress talked about the strong demand for NVIDIA's GeForce products through the entirety of 2021, and noted the company is working with suppliers to bring more inventory into the channel this year.
"The holiday demand, for example, was quite strong, particularly in laptops. And we're still finishing out our quarter. But we'll look at the end of the quarter in terms of what we've seen in terms of channel levels. We had seen channel levels be quite lean, and we are working with our supply chain partners to increase the availability of supply. And we feel better about our supply situation as we move into the second half of the calendar year '22," Kress said.
It's that final part of the comment that should excite gamers. It suggests the frustrating shortage of graphics cards will be at least a bit less frustrating during the last six months of year. Beyond that, Kress didn't offer up any other details on the shortage. But bear in mind that NVIDIA is expected to launch a new graphics card series this year as well.
The upcoming GeForce RTX 40 series (presumably) will run on NVIDIA's next-generation Ada Lovelace GPU, which will be based on TSMC's 5-nanometer manufacturing process. While new for NVIDIA, TSMC's N5 node has been around for a bit. That could mean strong yields, which in turn could lead to NVIDIA's confidence that the second half of 2022 will be better, in terms of supply.
In the meantime, NVIDIA continues to add and update its GeForce RTX 30 series. The company just recently added an upgraded GeForce RTX 3080 with more memory than the original model, and it's rumored an upgraded GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is right around the bend too. Likewise, there is chatter that NVIDIA has a large stock of its recently introduced GeForce RTX 3050 card.
As we've said before, the shortage won't last forever, even though it feels that way right now. Here's hoping it won't last through the entirety of 2022.
