Anatomy of a GPU launch
Getting the stars to align for a perfect launch is difficult at the best of times.
From delays to shortages, price gouging to early driver problems, Nvidia’s Ampere launch in 2020 could be the worst GPU launch in its history. It’s not that the product is bad – part of the problem is that it’s so good. Hopefully, by the time you read this, things will be in a much better state.
Part of the blame goes to the COVID-19 pandemic, naturally. It’s an easy scapegoat, but there’s no denying its impact on the technology sector. But COVID wasn’t the only problem.
When the RTX 3080 officially went on sale on September 17, online stores were met with unprecedented demand. Amazon says it saw more traffic than on Black Friday, if you can believe that. Naturally, supplies of the new wonder-GPU were nowhere near sufficient. Every major retail outlet apparently sold out within seconds, and the servers for multiple sites crashed under the load – Nvidia’s own storefront went down. When the dust settled, bots managed to procure many of the sales. Nvidia says it manually reviewed every order and canceled those that came from bots, as well as only allowing one GPU per buyer. It still wasn’t enough, as the RTX 3090 was basically an encore performance one week later.
Nvidia claims it had as much inventory on hand for the Ampere launch as it did for the Turing launch in 2018, but that overlooks the fact that major shortages occurred at the Turing launch. Even for those who did get a new GPU, things were still rough. I experienced crashes during testing of multiple third-party cards prior to the launch. This isn’t entirely unheard of, particularly with a new architecture and new drivers, but the initial crashing was far more rampant than I can recall seeing on any prior GPU. Factory-overclocked cards were particularly unstable. Nvidia’s 456.55 drivers fixed the crashing issues, about 10 days after the 3080 launch. 10 days of bumpy roads for the few who managed to buy a card isn’t the end of the world, but it was one more thing that went wrong.
Now we’re waiting for the RTX 3070 to launch, along with AMD’s RX 6000 series, the PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series X. I suspect demand will once again far outstrip supply for all of these, but maybe things will go better than the RTX 3080. Unfortunately, Nvidia’s CEO has stated that he expects shortages for Ampere to continue into 2021, so don’t hold your breath.
All indications are that Nvidia and its partners aren’t intentionally limiting supply; it just takes time to manufacture the GPUs, cards, and even packaging. Speaking of which, there are multiple accounts of stores shipping RTX 30-series cards without packaging, presumably because that part of the supply chain ran into problems. Somewhere down the line, everyone who wants an RTX 3080 – or an RX 6900 XT, PlayStation 5, or Xbox Series X – will be able to buy one. And if you’re not among the first wave of people to get the latest and greatest hardware, that just means you’re less likely to experience the initial teething problems. Let the early adopters do the beta testing; two months down the road, things will inevitably be better.
“All indications are that Nvidia and its partners aren’t intentionally limiting supply; it just takes time to manufacture the GPUs, cards, and even packaging.”