Nvidia’s new RTX 3080, 3070, 3060 Ti and 3090 and the AMD RX 6800 and 6800 XT are incredibly hard to find and sell immediately when they appear, due to an incredible demand that makes these GPUs worth many hundreds of dollars more. as MSRP. A Trump tax and rising cryptocurrency prices could also make it even more expensive. Many older graphics cards are also sold out online.
This week, Nvidia and AMD finally have some updates – and that’s bitter sweet news.
On the plus side, AMD says The edge he expects to sell more of his own reference design RX 6800, 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT cards on his own website in the first quarter of 2021 at their sticker prices, which would mean $ 579, $ 649 and $ 999 instead of inflated . But AMD is committed to making them available “to as many gamers as possible,” which may not reassure buyers that AMD has had a paper launch from the start.
Meanwhile, Nvidia now says that the provision of its GPUs to both consumers and partners “is likely to stay during the first quarter”, and we are not even talking about the first quarter of the year – Nvidia’s fiscal quarter ends until the end of April. It’s a very long wait.
Again, it is the demand, and not just the supply constraints, that keeps graphics cards out of our hands. Nvidia tells us that the RTX 30 series GPUs of $ 499 and above sold almost twice as much as the RTX 20 series after the same time. (The RTX 30 Series is a much bigger upgrade than the previous generation, please note – there were not many games back then that took advantage of Nvidia’s ray tracing, and people’s GTX 10 Series cards still held up. doodreg.)
Nvidia at least seems to think crypto-miners are not making up all the cards yet, despite the sky-high prices we recently saw for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
“If a demand for crypto starts or if we see a significant amount,” CFO Colette Kress said at a recent investor conference, “we could also take the opportunity to restart the CMP product line to address the demand. to address mining. ” CMP refers to Nvidia’s dedicated crypto-mining GPUs, which remove the video ports that miners do not need because they do not send graphics to a monitor, making it more profitable for Nvidia.
Neither Nvidia nor AMD are talking about whether Trump’s taxes could affect the price of their partners’ graphics cards at the moment and by how much. AMD would just say that they “will also support our partners in developing their custom AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card designs,” which is a big step back from what they said Hardware unboxing in November on how partners should be able to sell the RX 6800 XT within eight weeks at its original $ 649 MSRP.
AMD today praised during their back-to-back CES 2021 keynotes how its new graphics cards gave the company ‘guidance at the top’ and noted that ‘many gamers are excited about the Radeon RX 6000 series’, while Nvidia admits that’s it’s hard to find these products, and we want to thank you for your patience as we work hard to catch up. ”
It will wait, and you should not be surprised if Nvidia’s newly announced $ 329 GeForce RTX 3060 is a hell of a deal to buy, just like its predecessors. As many people have asked: why can’t we just buy one and ship it when it’s ready?