Monday, November 18th 2024
NVIDIA RTX 40-series Stocks Begin Drying Up as Decks are Cleared for RTX 50-series Blackwell
Chinese tech site Board Channels keeps tabs on the way computer hardware is moving at the very beginning of the supply-chain. It has some fascinating insights the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50-series "Blackwell" series of graphics cards. Apparently, NVIDIA has planned the transition between the current RTX 40-series "Ada" and the next-generation RTX 50-series such that there's minimal spillover inventory of the older generation graphics cards in the channel, so it doesn't end up with a situation similar to the one between the RTX 30-series "Ampere" and its successor. Back in 2021-22, the cryptocurrency mining boom, which waned toward the end of 2022, had caused an overproduction of RTX 30-series cards that lingered in the channel even as the RTX 40-series launched.
According to the report by Board Channels that's been translated by Gazlog and VideoCardz, the China-specific RTX 4090D has been vaporized from the channel, none of NVIDIA's AIC partners has any boards to sell. The RTX 4080 SUPER sees most AIC partners have their final batches shipping, which should clear out in November 2024. The RTX 4070 Ti SUPER isn't as prominent a SKU as the RTX 4080 SUPER, and is being phased out at the same pace as its bigger AD103-based sibling, with last orders shipping this month. The RTX 4070 SUPER and RTX 4070 remain the most popular high-end graphics SKUs in this generation, and NVIDIA will supply these SKUs throughout December. Given that the RTX 5070 series doesn't come out till February (with wide availability in March), this makes sense. The RTX 4060 series will phase out a lot slower than the other SKUs, given its popularity, and the fact that the RTX 5060 series won't ramp until Q2-2025.
Sources:
Board Channels #1, Board Channels #2, Gazlog, VideoCards
According to the report by Board Channels that's been translated by Gazlog and VideoCardz, the China-specific RTX 4090D has been vaporized from the channel, none of NVIDIA's AIC partners has any boards to sell. The RTX 4080 SUPER sees most AIC partners have their final batches shipping, which should clear out in November 2024. The RTX 4070 Ti SUPER isn't as prominent a SKU as the RTX 4080 SUPER, and is being phased out at the same pace as its bigger AD103-based sibling, with last orders shipping this month. The RTX 4070 SUPER and RTX 4070 remain the most popular high-end graphics SKUs in this generation, and NVIDIA will supply these SKUs throughout December. Given that the RTX 5070 series doesn't come out till February (with wide availability in March), this makes sense. The RTX 4060 series will phase out a lot slower than the other SKUs, given its popularity, and the fact that the RTX 5060 series won't ramp until Q2-2025.
17 Comments on NVIDIA RTX 40-series Stocks Begin Drying Up as Decks are Cleared for RTX 50-series Blackwell
DON'T WORRY! BE HAPPY!:peace:
I for one hope that Nvidia finds immense success in the HPC segment...that eventually will collapse when we reach peak LLM and a different fundamental kind of hardware needs to be created. At that point Nvidia will likely have to decide whether to keep the GPU division or spin it off...and the greed based decision will inevitably be to spin it off as a lower productivity and thus lower priority center. At that point Nvidia will have left-overs to sell and immense resources poured into hardware that has no practical purpose for the market (read: ray tracing cores) and have to either make a new thing (again, ray tracing), or be cost effective. It's what I hope for...even as I know that the likelier situation is simply to market fragmenting into brands representing a type of performance and price point rather than competing.
The PS5 pro has hinted that rDNA4's RT "improvements" will be just as lackluster as rDNA3s.
16GB would be great but doubt it'll happen until 6070 (when PS6 is coming out that probably has 24GB shared pool of GDDR7) then people will complain all over again.
Think of it as a water system, you have a limited storage tank (memory capacity), that is pumped to reach it's destination (GPU) you might have a great pipeline/pump to take the water from storage to the destination (memory interface/speed) but eventually the tank will run out and as it tries to fill put new liquid in, *slurp, cough cough, sputter stutter*
nGreedia really are just taking a major dump on their customers at this point, a xx70 or xx80 + cards, should never have a memory capacity issue that runs out in it's own lifespan (generation)
Also the biggest performance gap was 3090 => 4090 with about 60-70% on average and up to 2x in Ray Tracing/Path Tracing! Let's hope will see the same with the RTX 50s
I'm only saying this by the look of the RTX 5080 specs, which are crappy, to say the least...
AMD coming with new cards in early 2024 and I'm sure they'll be comparable at similar price points so it's not like people are getting ripped off.
So far, most of the good releases was piling the new x70 series against the old x90 series, and that was OK. Hopefully this will be the case now too, but I am not very confident.How do you know?
Maybe I'll sell my 4090 then :D