Well, the day has finally come and gone. The Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card has gone on sale and all but sold out at every retailer in a matter of minutes. The limited quantities of the card, have created a frenzy.
Firstly, if you thought about getting one of these new cards, you’re going to have to wait a long time.
Newegg Tweeted they received more traffic than the morning of Black Friday, which is insane for a graphics card. This is a launch for a new graphics card which is a generational leap and was hyped intensely before its release.
Allegedly, some retailers only got as many as 10 cards, which is obviously not enough. The hype surrounding this card in the lead up to launch was an indication a lot of gamers were going to buy one. Understandably, people are really pissed off.
Check out the replies to Nvidia’s celebratory Tweet about the RTX 3080
It turns out for every one who did not get a card, some scalpers did and the eBay listings are beginning to pour in. It’s clear that maybe bots were responsible for some of the purchases, I know some retailers held lotteries to get your chance to buy a card, but many did not.
To put things into perspective, $2500 AUD is about $1800 USD, more than double the US price. The RTX 3080 itself bought through a proper retailer at the MSRP is $1139. Sellers are basically seller these cards more than double the retail price.
I did also come across what appears to be a fraudulent listing for $10,000 AUD which I reported to eBay.
The bidding activity for the above listing pretty much proves its illegal bidding activity, possibly a scam of some kind.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the RTX 3090 and RTX 3070 go on sale. I cannot foresee the 3090 selling out too quickly given its expensive price tag and appeal towards more non-gaming users, but the RTX 3070 will undoubtedly cause another frenzy.
I do wonder why the quantities are so low, maybe the new Samsung 7nm process has yet to provide high yields for these cards, although, the lower price would suggest that yields are maybe not the problem and perhaps it’s just the ongoing pandemic slowing things down (manufacturing and shipping). Which seems likely given Sony is experiencing the same issues with its PS5 (reportedly).
After the incredible amounts of backlash, Nvidia has responded and all but confirmed bots and scalpers bought a majority of the cards in an official statement.
This morning we saw unprecedented demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 at global retailers, including the NVIDIA online store. At 6 a.m. pacific we attempted to push the NVIDIA store live. Despite preparation, the NVIDIA store was inundated with traffic and encountered an error. We were able to resolve the issues and sales began registering normally.
To stop bots and scalpers on the NVIDIA store, we’re doing everything humanly possible, including manually reviewing orders, to get these cards in the hands of legitimate customers.
Over 50 major global retailers had inventory at 6 a.m. pacific. Our NVIDIA team and partners are shipping more RTX 3080 cards every day to retailers.
We apologize to our customers for this morning’s experience.
I kind of accepted that I wouldn’t be able to get one of these 3080 cards anyway, so I didn’t even try ordering one or wasting my time refresher retailer websites trying to get one. I’ll try again in a month or so and see how I go then. Or maybe, AMD will handle their launch better and I’ll get a Big Navi card instead.
