NVIDIA Overwhelmed By GeForce 30 Series Demand Despite More Ampere Stock Than Turing At Launch

Most simply assumed that NVIDIA was playing fast and loose with inventory when it comes to the GeForce RTX 3080 and the GeForce RTX 3090. There have been wild rumors that NVIDIA was purposefully limiting the number of cards available at launch to manage its margins, or to control the flow of components needed by its board partners.

Whatever the case, there doesn’t seem to be some grand conspiracy by NVIDIA to artificially limit Ampere supply. In fact, according to Tony Tamasi, NVIDIA VP Of Technical Marketing, the company has done everything in its power to provide as many Ampere cards to customers as possible during launch.

“Demand almost regardless of what we did was going to exceed our supply,” said Tamasi during our Two And A Half Geeks broadcast yesterday. And when you think about it, that’s definitely true. It’s been two years since NVIDIA launched its GeForce RTX 20 Series of Turing graphics cards, and nothing released in the consumer graphics market since – until now -- has been able to topple the performance high water mark set by the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. When the GeForce RTX 3080 was announced with double the performance of the GeForce RTX 2080 with a price tag that was half that of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, there was sure to be a huge run on the cards by gamers (and bots).

“We had as much or more supply for this product as we’ve had of any product in recent memory,” Tamasi added. This means that in actuality, NVIDIA had more Ampere cards available at launch than it did for the Turing launch two years ago. That is probably little solace for those that haven’t been able to secure a GeForce RTX 3080 or GeForce RTX 3090 yet, but NVIDIA hasn’t exactly been sitting on its hands while all of this has been going on. 

“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. I just think that the demand was enormous.”

Tamasi went on to say that there are still a lot of things that it can to do make things better on its side (especially with regards to its own online sales via its shopping portal) and that yields for Samsung’s 8nm process node have been good. The company is making GPUs as fast as it can, and hopefully, supply will catch up with demand in the coming months. The real test for NVIDIA, however, will be when the GeForce RTX 3070 launches in October. That card is promising greater-than-GeForce RTX 2080 Ti performance at just $499, and is sure to be a must-have purchase for gamers. Will NVIDIA and its partners be able to cope with demand? We sure hope so…