The new RTX 3080, 3070, 3060 Ti and 3090 from Nvidia and the AMD RX 6800 and 6800 XT are incredibly difficult to find, running out instantly whenever they appear, due to an incredible level of demand that makes these GPUs worth many. hundreds of dollars more than MSRP. A Trump tax and rising cryptocurrency prices may be about to make them even more expensive. Many old video cards are also sold out online.
This week, Nvidia and AMD finally have some updates – and bittersweet news.
On the positive side, AMD says The Verge it expects to sell more of its RX 6800, 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT reference design cards on its own website in the first quarter of 2021 at its label prices, which should mean $ 579, $ 649 and $ 999 rather than inflated prices. But AMD is just committing to making them available “to as many players as possible”, which may not reassure buyers who thought AMD had a paper launch to begin with.
Nvidia, for its part, is now saying that the supply of its GPUs to consumers and partners “will likely remain thin during the first quarter”, and we are not even talking about the first quarter of the year – Nvidia’s first fiscal quarter does not end until the end of april. It’s a terribly long wait.
Again, it is demand, not just supply constraints, that are keeping graphics cards out of our hands. Nvidia tells us that since launch, its $ 499 or more RTX 30 series GPUs have sold almost twice as much as the RTX 20 series sold after the same time. (The RTX 30 series is a much bigger update than the previous generation, mind you – there weren’t many games that took advantage of Nvidia’s lightning tracking at the time, and people’s GTX series 10 cards were still holding up well.)
Nvidia at least seems to think that crypto miners aren’t picking up all the cards yet, despite the sky-high prices we’ve seen recently for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
“If demand cryptography starts or if we see a significant amount,” said CFO Colette Kress at a recent investor conference, “we can also use this opportunity to restart the CMP product line to meet ongoing mining demand.” CMP refers to Nvidia’s dedicated crypto mining GPUs, which remove the video ports that miners don’t need because they don’t direct graphics to a monitor, making them more profitable for Nvidia.
Neither Nvidia nor AMD are talking about whether Trump’s taxes can impact the price of their partners’ video cards now and by how much. AMD just said that “it will also continue to support our partners in the development of their custom AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card designs”, which is a big step back from what it said Hardware out of the box in November, about how partners should be able to sell the RX 6800 XT for the original suggested price of $ 649 within eight weeks.
During CES 2021 consecutive talks today, AMD praised how its new graphics cards gave the company “leadership at the top” and noted that “many players are excited about the Radeon RX 6000 series”, while Nvidia acknowledged that “these products have been hard to find and we want to thank you for your patience as we continue to work hard to reach them. ”
It will be a wait, and you shouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia’s recently announced GeForce RTX 3060 for $ 329 is a hell of a buy, just like its predecessors. As many have asked: why can’t we just buy one and they ship when it’s ready?