Did you want to treat yourself to an RTX 3070, 3080 or 3090 for Christmas? Unfortunately, you will probably have to arm yourself with patience. We explain why.
THE PRICE OF SUCCESS?
Launched with great fanfare on October 29, 2020, the RTX 30 Series is the new generation of NVIDIA brand GPUs. A real revolution, allowing an impressive power. Thus, the RTX 3080 has a gross power of 58 TFlops or four times the power of the Xbox Series X. As for the RTX 3090, it allows productions to operate in 4K Ultra, with a bandwidth of up to TB / s.
Considering these stunning performances, one can only understand the immense success of the RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090. Such a success that very quickly NVIDIA was overwhelmed by demand, and is currently facing a shortage of RTX 30 Series. At a press conference, NVIDIA announced that the shortage is likely to last until early 2021, in January for the most optimistic scenarios, or in February for the most pessimistic. In other words, it will not be possible to get a new generation RTX for Christmas …
The company has put forward two explanations for the current shortage. First of all, according to the group, the new generation RTXs are taking too long to produce. Jensen Huang, co-creator of NVIDIA, confessed to wanting ” for production cycles to be shorter ” … Then, the Covid-19 pandemic made ” the distribution channels [less] agile “.
Other factors, which Jensen Huang did not mention, may have accelerated the shortage. First of all, the confinement could have boosted sales of the RTX 30 Series: indeed, according to a study by the union of leisure software publishers, a third of French players have confessed to playing more than before the confinement. We imagine that these figures must be roughly equivalent in other countries. This third of gamers could therefore have been more easily seduced by the opportunity to use an RTX 30 Series.
Moreover, as a statement from NVIDIA sent to their shareholders reminds us, sales of the previous generation RTX card had been disappointing for NVIDIA. According to the group, customers had delayed their purchase, both because of the expensive price of the cards, but also because of a few video games required as high performance as that offered by RTX GPUs. In other words, the immense progress in the field of video games in recent years could explain the fact that gamers are more and more tempted by the purchase of an RTX card. We recall, for example, that CD Projekt Red has just unveiled the PC configurations required for Cyberpunk 2077
