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
There is no way Nvidia artificially limit the supply, claiming so is either crazy or completely clueless. Nvidia don't earn anything extra from inflated prices by retailers, and they have every intention to move as many cards as they can, especially if they face uncertain competition from AMD soon.
This launch is simply another case of higher demand than supplies. The demand seems to be even higher this time. There is no conspiracy, just tens of thousands of eager buyers.This nonsense is already debunked, just look at AiBs like Asus, MSI, Zotac and Gigabyte offering cards at the same MSRP as Nvidia.
It's sad to see that this garbage gets this kind of attention. He is trolling you, and you and the author here fell for it.
Low stock is not the same as artificially limiting stock.
Think.
We'll see in the coming weeks if those AIB cards are available at MSRP or not.That is very open to interpretation, we'll see how this goes the next days.
On a side note, some shops are also selling the 3090, or at least they say they are, but at $2k a card.
yeah the history of your gpu's selling out every month for 3 years straight (FE official store variant) wasn't forewarning enough. lulz w.e
I can't wait for my Big Navi and Ryzen 4800x. Take care Intel and Nvidia, it was a fun ride.
That said, I fully believe they rushed this out without enough product... but let's be clear on what a paper launch actually means. ;)
Because those are all facts.
Many people didnt upgrade to 2000 series they keep their GTX 1000's till now....
There's tons of 1080 Ti ( priced under 400$) on sale as the 2080 Ti's . Someone here in my local craiglist site selling his 2080 Ti MSI Seahawk EK !!! For 550$ !!! That dude is crazy !
All because of the 2000 series disappointment the real failure is the first RTX series not this launch !
People seeing now the 3000 series priced correctly for the performance jump they will get of course they all want to upgrade asap !
Plus games like Cyberpunk 2077, Crysis Remastered and many others are pushiing PC players to upgrade.
ftfy :)
This has been the trend for quite some time now; I was hoping to grab one, but knew it was a far fetched dream. They can say what they want, but they could care less about the GPU's ending up in the hands of anyone as long as they get sold.
Reading some posts feels like strapping on lead boots and trying to jump.
Basic accounting you should have 2x2 at least 4 times as much stock as last launch. Add to it the current shortages for computer parts leading to a build up, maybe nVidia should do the reasonable thing and wait until they have 10x more in stock before launching.
The bots are an excuse. Bots exist where lack of supply exists. It is not a demand issue. If you have enough product it isn't worth a bot's "time". I'm not "too mad" but shame on nVidia.
I'd like to add that, although COVID has done quite the economic impact worldwide, there could be a lot of people with money burning holes in their pockets. Add to that that a lot of people held onto their GTX 1000 series cards (or even earlier ones) because they didn't see much appeal in Turing (with or without first-gen RTX) and now feel the itch to upgrade, and it's not impossible that demand for the new cards could be above what Nvidia and partners prepared for.You're most welcome.I wonder what happened with that lawsuit (?) about Nvidia not telling investors that their cards sold really well because crypto boom and all that.
Bots coulda been stopped with one of those captchas or a phone number verification method.
For these companies to tell us the exact day and time preorders would be available was basically them telling the bot handlers to attack at a specific date and time.
I am just so happy I got mine!!!
The depths to which AMD fanboys will sink is getting lower every day.
RTX 3080 (DONT BUY FROM SCALPERS) DO NOT BUY THIS (Read Description)
NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3080 RENDER - DO NOT BUY (Read Description).
Would be more fun if scalpers bought this :laugh::nutkick:
The "immediate non-availability" is not a "fact" either. While I don't know the global distribution between wholesalers, a single scandinavian shop got hundreds of these, so there were likely many thousands globally. All the facts points to it not being a paper launch, just extreme demand.
Or it could be, as Occam's razor would dictate, there are a lot of people who want these cards and not a lot to go around (which is not the same as a paper launch, I don't understand why I even have to explain this).
But fanboys and logic don't mesh too well at the best of times.