Why Nvidia might’ve cooked up a troublesome 30-series launch
Mark Williams investigates why Jenson might’ve cooked up a troublesome 30 series.
After Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, announced the RTX 30-series back in early September from his kitchen, there was a disturbance in the PC market. Up until then the RTX 2080 Ti was the king of the hill for performance, but unlike previous generations it cost substantially more than what we’d ever seen previously for a gamer-focused graphics card. In the order of over $1,000 more than previously seen. The 20-series set a new bar for cost to performance in a bad way, and while we complained about it at the time, the introduction of real time ray tracing amongst other new technologies kind of made it easier to swallow.
Fast forward to the RTX 30-series launch, and Nvidia has righted the ship once again in terms of pricing… sort of.
The RTX 3080 is generally 2030 percent faster than the RTX 2080 Ti – depending on the task – and yet only demands a price of around $1,400, substantially less than the $2,300 the RTX 2080 Ti was selling for just the month before.
Selling a slower product for more obviously couldn’t continue, and after the release of the RTX 3080 the RTX 2080 Ti prices started to drop. As I write this, new ones can be had for around $1,600, a massive $700 (30 percent) reduction! Someone has had to eat that stock write-down. I would not want to be the accountant of the company that has had to absorb it.
As you might’ve noticed, the new 2080 Ti $1,600 price tag is still more than the $1,400 of the RTX 3080.
That is largely thanks to Nvidia’s bungled launch of the
“Hype and pent-up demand were so high – and the usage of bots for automatically purchasing any stock by scalpers – was so rife that the whole launch has turned into something of a farce.”
RTX 3080. It appears that while it was a hard launch, stocks were so limited that they sold out mere moments after they went up for sale. Hype and pent-up demand were so high – and the usage of bots for automatically purchasing any stock by scalpers – was so rife that the whole launch has turned into something of a farce.
The RTX 3090 which launched weeks after at an even more insane asking price of around $2,900 disappeared just as quickly as it appeared.
As a result, while 2080 Ti’s might be slower, at least they’re still in stock, and so can still command a premium.
Demand is so high for the RTX 3080 that one of MSI’s subsidiary companies was caught selling them for double their MSRP on eBay. Shame on them, and they’ve now offered to refund those purchasers the difference over MSRP, but it does show just how much demand there is for these new cards and what people are willing to pay to get them.
With all stocks sold out globally and word from Nvidia that it might take until the new year before RTX 3080/90 stocks begin to catch up to demand, it begs the question why Nvidia even bothered to launch the 30 series at this time?
The answer may lie with Nvidia’s competitor, AMD, and its upcoming RX 6000 series graphics card launch coming near the end of October. While the RTX 3080 is a big speed improvement over the RTX 2080 (non Ti) it’s replacing, it is only a 20-30 percent improvement over the RTX 2080 Ti, which AMD has been aiming to steam roll with the RX 6000 series.
With all rumours and leaks pointing to a die size of at least double that of the RX 5700 XT with even higher clock speeds, and the improved RDNA2 architecture soon to debut in the new PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles – and now with word coming through that it also comes with a massive on-die 128MB cache – it all points to a chip that can go toe-to-toe with the RTX 3080. On a more advanced 7nm node than the 8nm that Nvidia is making do with, it’ll likely consume less power and cost less to boot, and thanks to that cache, AMD can use more affordable GDDR6 as well.
This threat from AMD is why Nvidia’s launch of the RTX 3070 has been postponed until after the RX6000 series launches, so Nvidia can react accordingly and is possibly why Nvidia launched when it did, to make hay while the sun shines.
If you’re in the market for a graphics card, we recommend you wait until AMD launches its offerings to see how the market reacts before making your choice. Although if Nvidia continues to have supply issues, you might not have much choice at all in what to buy.
“Demand is so high for the RTX 3080 that one of MSI’s subsidiary companies was caught selling them for double their MSRP on eBay. Shame on them.”