French hardware site Cowcotland has shared a report claiming that the industry is suffering from a global GDDR6 memory shortage, which, if true, would certainly add to the growing list of reasons as to why certain graphics cards are impossible to find these days. Those would include NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3070 and newly launched GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, as well as AMD’s entire lineup of Radeon RX 6000 Series GPUs—all of these leverage GDDR6 memory.
According to Cowcotland’s sources, availability of NVIDIA and AMD GPUs isn’t expected to stabilize and return to acceptable levels until two or three months from now. Radeon RX 6900 XT stock is also expected to be heavily affected.
“[…] it will take weeks for the situation to return to normal, which means that the availability of all models will not improve until February, even blocking the release of some models (such as the 6900XT Custom),” Cowcotland wrote.
Cowcotland notes that NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 will be “less impacted” by this problem because they utilize GDDR6X memory instead of GDDR6, but that point seems to be moot, as their stock levels are clearly terrible already.
During the recent Credit Suisse 24th Annual Technology Conference, NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress confirmed that the production of GeForce graphics cards were being hampered by supply constraints (e.g., lack of waters and silicon) and did not expect things to improve for at least a couple of months.
“We do have supply constraints and our supply constraints do expand past what we are seeing in terms of wafers and silicon, but yes some constraints are in substrates and components,” Kress said. “We continue to work during the quarter on our supply and we believe though that demand will probably exceed supply in Q4 for overall gaming.”