Friday, September 18th 2020
NVIDIA RTX 3080 Release Availability Could be a Novel
Scour the Internet's most likely tech-related places in forums such as TechPowerUp's own and Reddit, and a picture begins to form regarding NVIDIA's RTX 3080 launch. It's a bit like a Dali painting, with surrealist expectations, a whispered "NVIDIA's Ultimate Play" through virtual hallways, blink-and-you-missed-it details materialized in stock availability, and science-fiction-worthy bots scouring all available stores for their deployment overlords. Wherever you turn, there are would-be buyers complaining of furious F5 attempts (we heard F5 key replacements are also out of stock these days), with store availability going from "available soon" to "out of stock" faster than a single DOOM Eternal frame can be rendered. Most webstores crashed in one way or another, multiple buyers got attributed the same card from a webstore stock, and even NVIDIA's own store (you know, the one powered by the company who actually drives some of the world's fastest supercomputers) faltered under the pressure.
In other corners of the Internet, however, expectations were met and attempts flourished. These seem to have been mostly met by scalpers, though, so there is nothing idyllic in this particular painting - it's more akin to Edvard Munch's The Scream than it is Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. On eBay, an RTX 3080 card was allegedly sold for 70,000$ - a particularly criminal act, if I've ever seen one. It's also common, right now, to see some of these going for prices ranging between $1,300 and $5,000 - and at this point, this writer feels he's almost out of metaphors for this particular situation. Apparently, a service named Bounce Alerts was used - it appears that most RTX 3080 orders were done through this service, which automatically bought as much RTX 3080 stock as it could from wherever they were sold. A user reported having acquired some 42 RTX 3080's from the NVIDIA store before stock ran out. There are even bots designed to bid on eBay sales so as to waste scalpers' time and make orders that will never be fulfilled - a sort of poetic justice, if you may, though I don't believe the kind Shakespeare himself would have conceived of.
Cue NVIDIA itself coming out with a statement that manual reviews of placed orders are being done to try and filter out bot or trigger-happy scalper orders, and you've got yourself what may seem more akin to a paper launch than a real, hardware-on-the-shelf one. It should be noted, though - expectations were high, and they seem to have been met. And of course, customers who failed to materialize any order at all will always be more vocal than those who did secure one - it's human nature 101. We'll have to wait and see how availability pans out in the next couple of weeks - only then can we actually look at this event without any novelization. However, one thing can be said: the RTX 3080's launch is a dog from hell. Bukowski knew it before we all did.
Sources:
Gizmodo, Legit Reviews, NVIDIA's Ultimate Play - Moore's Law is Dead, Videocardz
In other corners of the Internet, however, expectations were met and attempts flourished. These seem to have been mostly met by scalpers, though, so there is nothing idyllic in this particular painting - it's more akin to Edvard Munch's The Scream than it is Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. On eBay, an RTX 3080 card was allegedly sold for 70,000$ - a particularly criminal act, if I've ever seen one. It's also common, right now, to see some of these going for prices ranging between $1,300 and $5,000 - and at this point, this writer feels he's almost out of metaphors for this particular situation. Apparently, a service named Bounce Alerts was used - it appears that most RTX 3080 orders were done through this service, which automatically bought as much RTX 3080 stock as it could from wherever they were sold. A user reported having acquired some 42 RTX 3080's from the NVIDIA store before stock ran out. There are even bots designed to bid on eBay sales so as to waste scalpers' time and make orders that will never be fulfilled - a sort of poetic justice, if you may, though I don't believe the kind Shakespeare himself would have conceived of.
"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.Oh NVIDIA, this launch has our hearts.
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." - NVIDIA PR on 9/17/2020
109 Comments on NVIDIA RTX 3080 Release Availability Could be a Novel
I'm actually curious as to how some of those buying bots work; such as, do they have a list of verified, but cover emails they place 1 order with, and do said emails have something like a separate PO Box assigned? Or is the shipping so automated it doesn't care about the address, just that the email that did the purchase was limited to 1 per, thus being able to send something like 40+ GPUs to a scalper's home (or even worse; it doesn't care about email and physical address; just that it's only 1 item per order). I'm inclined to believe it's the latter, since NVIDIA is actually having to go in and verify orders by hand.
Wonder why you can not get hold of an 3080 partner card at release!!!
Miners already had nvidia partner cards in their hands 10 days ago.
A big chunk of the first 3080 batch of nvidia partner cards went out the backdoor to miners well before the release.
If nvidia does not set a stop to this THERE WILL BE BIG A SHORTAGE and PRICE INCREASE BEFORE XMAS.
Don't think AMD RDNA2 release 28 Oct will make the situation better, with such a late release we will see very limited stock of RDNA2 cards before Q1 2021.
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"Well, it looks like GeForce RTX 3080 stock is going to be non-existent thanks to crypto miners -- as the new Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080 is an Ethereum mining beast."
"Just how fast is the RTX 3080 at Ethereum mining? Well, we're looking at a rumored 115MH/s from the GeForce RTX 3080, which is 3-4x faster than the 30-40MH/s or so that the Turing-based GeForce RTX 2080 is capable of."
Pictures taken before September 9th of miners stocking up.
And she will also use it to get all of the 3090's when they launch, so we are all just S.O.L. until next year when production catches up with demand...
j/k... physch...made ya look ..:roll:..:eek:..:clap:
The whole crypto thing was a good idea perverted into something ugly by greed #differenttopic.
Even a few hours after launch, there were cards in stock. That could have something to do with the comparably high investment vs. salary here though.
That said, a lot of retailers didn't even list the cards so...
Anyways, he reiterated this in newer videos and there's others saying the same thing.
But you are free to believe that the shortage of 3080 we are witnessing is due to thousands of miners and bots. And the thousands of bot owners aren't reselling their cards, because...? As other YouTubers have noticed, there must have been more 3080 available to reviewers than there were for sale.
And guess why he justifies his legitimacy. Because there will still be people calling him a radeon fanboy...
Grab em, slap a new shipping label on them for $400 is a quick way to make a buck. Worst case scenario is they take up some space until you sell it for what you bought it at.
Why nvidia doesnt put a 10 second time limit on each screen of the checkout process or error to stop bots is beyond me (well maybe not, they like it when people fight over their stuff).