Nvidia says RTX 30 GPUs will be in short supply until April
You're going to have a hard time finding the green giant's latest and greatest graphics tech for sometime yet.
Graphics specialist Nvidia has said that there's going to be limited stock of its RTX 30 cards for the next few months.
Speaking at the 19th Annual J.P. Morgan Tech/Auto Forum Conference - as reported by Seeking Alpha - the company's chief financial officer Colette Kress admitted that it hadn't been able to keep supply level with demand. The exec said that there wasn't much stock in the pipeline at the moment and that this is likely to be the case "throughout Q1" - or until the end of March in non-corporate speak.
"In order to talk about supply, we first have to discuss the demand. We did have an exceptional overall holiday season," Kress explained.
"Gaming demand is off the charts. Our overall Ampere architecture and ray tracing are really a true success. This demand has remained stronger for longer. Supply does remain tight at this time. We expect the overall channel inventories, meaning the inventories that are with our AIC partners as well as in our e-tail and retail channels will likely remain lean throughout Q1.
"Our overall capacity has not been able to keep up with that overall strong demand that we have seen. We’ve seen in terms of constraints, constraints really from the overall global surge of compute and the overall capacity, capacity that may be necessary for assembly and test and/or sub trades as well. But again, we remain focused on this and working each day to improve our overall supply situation."
Nvidia revealed its new RTX-capable line of graphics cards in September but supply has been dwarfed by demand since. The fact that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been surging in value might be a contributing factor to GPUs being in such high demand as this hardware is often used for mining these digital currencies. Kress admits that Nvidia doesn't actually know how much demand for RTX 30 cards has been driven by this.
Regardless of how hard it is to actually get your hands on the RTX 30 cards, we've been pretty impressed with them since they came out. In our review, we described the RTX 3070 as not only the new 1440p king," but also said that it was "great value for money." Meanwhile, we said that the RTX 3060 Ti was "a killer graphics card for next-gen ray tracing on a budget."