NVIDIA fans who haven’t been able to purchase a GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics card yet will likely have to continue fighting an uphill battle well into the new year.
During yesterday’s Q3 2021 earnings call (via Seeking Alpha), NVIDIA EVP and CFO Colette Kress admitted that it could take a few months for Ampere stock to normalize due to manufacturing constraints, as well as incredible demand.
“While we had anticipated strong demand, it exceeded even our bullish expectations,” Kress said. “Given industry-wide capacity constraints and long cycle times, it may take a few more months for product availability to catch up with demand.”
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang echoed this during a Q&A last month, noting that GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards would be very tough to find this holiday.
“The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue,” said Huang. “The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected — and we expected really a lot.”
“Retailers will tell you they haven’t seen a phenomenon like this in over a decade of computing. It hearkens back to the old days of Windows 95 and Pentium when people were just out of their minds to buy this stuff. So this is a phenomenon like we’ve not seen in a long time, and we just weren’t prepared for it.”
AMD is having similar trouble with its newly launched Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards, which are nowhere to be found aside from auction sites. Some users claim that the stock for RDNA 2 GPUs is even worse than Ampere.