NVIDIA Ampere RTX 3080 picture-2

NVIDIA issues an official statement regarding the RTX 3080 GPU’s stock availability at launch day

As you may already know Nvidia recently launched its Ampere RTX 3080 GPU, and many were hoping to purchase these cards, but it was just another paper launch. The RTX 3080 stocks were sold out immediately within few minutes at several retailers across the US, UK and Europe. Some Major e-tailers also experienced extremely high wave of traffic, and this brought their entire website down as well.

Even NVIDIA’s official store had an issue where people couldn’t finish their purchase, after adding the item to the shopping cart. Many customers claim that the listings disappeared in 15 seconds, and cards sold out before the Add to Cart button even worked for them. The stock immediately depleted, almost as if there was no stock at all to begin with.

What’s even worse is that a lot of RTX 3080 graphics cards didn’t even ship to gamers, because scalpers purchased these graphics card in bulk to sell them for profit elsewhere. Scalpers were demanding anywhere from $1000 to $2000+ USD for these cards

Now the Green team has published an official Q&A explaining the RTX 3080’s launch availability. The company has promised to implement more security measures to combat people buying cards using bots, and they plan to implement CAPTCHA. This whole GPU launch was a mess, gamers and customers criticized Nvidia for poorly managing the situation. The company has already cancelled several orders which were placed using BOTS.

There is also some confirmation that the RTX 3080 is in full production, and board partners/AIBs will continue to get shipments. The supply situation should hopefully catch up quickly with the rising demand. The RTX 3090 is going to launch on September 24th, and considering that this card will cost at least 1499 USD, the demand should be hopefully less for this particular GPU. This is definitely one of the most broken launch events ever witnessed for a flagship graphics card which indeed had huge demand, but this created much unrest in the gaming community.

To quote NVIDIA’s official Q&A:

What happened? I was really excited for the GeForce RTX 3080, but the launch has made it near impossible to find one and this is really disappointing.

The demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 was truly unprecedented. We and our partners underestimated it.

Over 50 major global retailers had inventory on the day of launch. Our retail partners reported record traffic to their sites, in many cases exceeding Black Friday. This caused crashes, delays and other issues for their customers. We knew the GeForce RTX 3080 would be popular, but none of us expected that much traffic on the first day.

What’s the overall GeForce RTX 3080 stock situation?

The GeForce RTX 3080 is in full production. We began shipping GPUs to our partners in August, and have been increasing the supply weekly. Partners are also ramping up capacity to meet the unprecedented demand. We understand that many gamers are unable to buy a GeForce RTX 3080 right now and we are doing everything we can to catch up quickly. Keep checking in with your favorite retailer to be notified of availability. You may use the GeForce RTX 3080 product finder to find available cards at local retailers.

Why does availability start with such low inventory? Why not wait until more cards are produced?

We have great supply – just not for this level of demand. It is typical for initial demand to exceed supply for our new GPUs. Our global network of partners are ramping as hard as they can to get the new GPUs to the more than 100 million GeForce gamers around the world. Our philosophy has always been to get the latest technology into the hands of gamers as fast as possible. As we race to build more GeForce RTX 3080s, we suggest not buying from opportunistic resellers who are attempting to take advantage of the current situation.

What changes are you making to the NVIDIA Store moving forward?

As with many other etailers, the NVIDIA Store was also overrun with malicious bots and resellers. To combat this challenge we have made the following changes: we moved our NVIDIA Store to a dedicated environment, with increased capacity and more bot protection. We updated the code to be more efficient on the server load. We integrated CAPTCHA to the checkout flow to help offset the use of bots. We implemented additional security protections to the store APIs. And more efforts are underway.

You said the NVIDIA store would have GeForce RTX 3080s at 6 a.m. on September 17th, why did the store immediately go from “notify me” to “out of stock”?

At 6 a.m. pacific we attempted to push the NVIDIA store live.  Instantly, the NVIDIA store was inundated with over 10 times the traffic of our previous generation launch, which took our internal systems to a crawl and encountered an error preventing sales from starting properly at 6:00am pacific. We were able to resolve the issues and process orders later than planned.

I saw individuals who use bots/scripts celebrating the purchase of multiple GeForce RTX 3080 GPUs! Did bots get all of the available supply?

No. While individuals using bots may have shown images of email inboxes filled with confirmed orders, NVIDIA has cancelled hundreds of orders manually before they were able to ship.

Why did the NVIDIA Store not have any preventative measures in place to battle bots (i.e. CAPTCHA,etc)?

The NVIDIA Store had many behind-the-scenes security measures in place which proved sufficient for previous launches. This is the first time that we have seen bots at this scale and sophistication. Since launch, we have been quickly working on numerous security upgrades, including CAPTCHA. We will also continue to manually monitor purchases to help ensure cards get in the hands of legitimate consumers.

Why did NVIDIA send “Notify Me” emails knowing that RTX 3080 FE was out of stock?

We intended for “Notify Me” emails to go out at 6:00 a.m. with the targeted start of availability. Due to the extreme demand and site traffic, we were unable to properly process orders on time. The emails were held back until the errors were resolved later than morning. Still, inventory sold out very quickly, so we were sold out by time most people opened their emails. In retrospect, we should not have sent the “Notify Me” emails. Thank you for listening, and thank you for your continued support as we navigate through this. We are excited that you are excited about the GeForce RTX 3080 and we are committed to do everything possible to catch up to the demand as quickly as we can- NVIDIA.

24 thoughts on “NVIDIA issues an official statement regarding the RTX 3080 GPU’s stock availability at launch day”

    1. Good news, and hope you are going to be more advanced and up to date, cause right now your software looks absolute.

  1. We’ll they’re honest now but sincerely they did a piss poor job for this launch.. like many launches the fomo was so real that it ended up everybody actually missing out besides a chosen few.

  2. They can fruck off. The amount of lies is unreal. Yeah, one of the worlds leading A.I companies was bamboozled by some script kiddies.. sure. There were major cities that had a total allocation of 5 cards but they didn’t think demand would be higher.. sure.

    The truth is, they knew they didn’t have inventory for customers. They sent tons of cards to Youtubers to drum up positive reviews at the so-called MSRP knowing that the real price would be higher later on. They were deliberately vague about the 3090 because it’s garbage at 10% performance over the 3080. And they did all this in a mad rush to get as many people to pre-order as they could before AMD revealed much better value cards.

    Btw, I wasn’t even in the market for a card this year I’m speaking purely as a Nvidia fan who is fed up with all their BS.

  3. No doubt that the 3080 is a great deal, but I’m more than fine waiting 6-9 months before shelling out the money and getting one. Not succumbing to FOMO can be difficult in a culture that values the newest, brightest thing, but it can be very rewarding to shrug off that instinct.

    Plus I’m looking for a definitive 4k 60fps card, and I am not convinced that 10GB VRAM is going to be sufficient for a 2160p texture cache in games released 2 years from now.

  4. at first i was upset but with a 16gb model coming soon i feel relieved. honestly you can tell the yield rumor is true and thats why there pooping out a gimped 10gb to get rid of what was usable and slapped 10gb on it.

      1. Not bothering, ever? Or just waiting until the demand has died down? It’s not much trouble to just be at my PC and logged in at 6am PST and ready to refresh and checkout really quickly if there’s a chance I get one of the first few. If I don’t get one then I don’t get one; it’s not the end of the world.

        But anyways… I wasn’t asking anyone’s opinion on whether I should get a 3090 or not. I was asking if anyone knew what time the orders would go live for the FE 3090. Do you know the answer to this question or not?

    1. Yes, I think RTX 3090’s release time on September 24th should likely be the same as the RTX 3080 – that is, 6am PT / 2pm BST, unless Nvidia plans to change this due to the recent 3080 scalper bot fiasco.

      1. Thank you.

        That’s the main thing I’ve wondered. Will they change it for any reason to try and mitigate the issues with the 3080 orders? What would changing it even mitigate?

        Should I subscribe to Bounce alerts? Lol

        I hope I get one. If not, then I’ll just have to wait until next year when stock is obtainable, but this card has to perform better than 10% over the 3080. Only a 10% gain but a price difference of 120% is just nearly impossible for me to believe. I’m hoping to get at least a 60-75% performance increase over my 2080 Ti, and given the increase in CUDA cores alone, I just don’t see how this wouldn’t be so.

        1. “but this card has to perform better than 10% over the 3080”

          I don’t know, I’ve heard rumors it’s about 10% faster.
          I would wait for gaming benchmarks before forking out so much money. Unless it’s no object for you.

          1. It’s not a huge object for me no, but I want to actually secure an FE card so I’m pretty much forced to buy one the moment they go live if I want to be able to get one, so I won’t be able to wait for benchmarks because the embargo doesn’t lift until the day of, which I think is pretty crappy of NVIDIA and suspicious.

        2. I don’t think they will change the date/time. Now the company is already aware of the recent bot attack, and they are already taking security measures this time, even on Nvidia’s own website.

          So I think this time scalpers won’t be able to bypass the new security measures implemented, imo.

  5. all this makes me laugh, we all know that nvidia had very little stock, they are taking advantage of all this enthusiasm to value their next orders, everything is orchestrated from the start, “the carrot disappears, and the frustration increases, which forces the impulse buying and desperate waiting ” …..how to create lack, and envy.

  6. I was just on Ebay having a look and the scalper scum there are advertising “buy it now” for anywhere between $1,300 and $1,800

    This reminds me of when the miners were buying up all of the 1080 Ti and a gamer couldn’t buy one unless they got scalped or bought one from an etailer that was price gouging. That situation never really got resolved and I expect it will be many months before this one is resolved and that’s being optimistic.

    “The GeForce RTX 3080 is in full production. Partners are also ramping up capacity to meet the unprecedented demand.”

    Nvidia said the same thing about the 1080 Ti shortage and they did ramp up production some but it didn’t make much of a difference. The reality is that there is a limit to how many GPU chips they can get from Samsung and they will probably negotiate to get some more production but there is a limit.

    Greed is a hell of a thing and these scalpers aren’t going to stop as long as there is big money to be made. They may not be able to use bots on Nvidia’s Store but they can elsewhere on other stores and individuals can buy them even if they don’t plan to ever use them and scalp them on sites like Ebay.

  7. “We have great supply”

    That’s a lie!!!

    Sweden had roughly 550 partner cards in total, distributed to three major resellers, each one of these three stores had about 30 graphic cards of each brand. There were about 6 different brands available at launch. 30 x 6 x 3 = 540 units, in a sea of multiple thousand people demanding to buy…. Great supply? Not even close!

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