You probably won’t be getting an RTX 3000-series in 2020, as Nvidia’s CEO says “I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year”. The company has already acknowledged that it was unprepared for how fast the cards would sell, and now says there’s no supply issue – instead, there’s just not enough supply.
“The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue”, CEO Jensen Huang says in a press Q&A, via Tom’s Hardware. “The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected – and we expected really a lot.” Huang says that the demand is comparable to that of “the old days of Windows 95 and Pentium when people were just out of their minds to buy this stuff”.
Huang says that “even if we knew about all the demand, I don’t think it’s possible to have ramped that fast. We’re ramping really, really hard. Yields are great, the product’s shipping fantastically, it’s just getting sold out instantly. I appreciate it very much, I just don’t think there’s a real problem to solve. It’s a phenomenon to observe. It’s just a phenomenon.”
So there you have it, it’s not a supply issue, it’s just that demand is too great for Nvidia to be able to supply adequately. Got it? (If so, please explain it to me.)
Now the 3070 has been delayed in an effort to build up supply ahead of launch, too. The 3000 series is probably going to rip apart our guide to the best graphics card – whenever there are actually enough of them out there, that is, and pending whatever AMD has up its sleeves.