Ray Tracer
I was an early adopter for the Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080. At the time, I wanted an upgrade from the 1070 to help with VR frame times and to enjoy the ray traced goodness. Long story short, the performance jump was not super impressive and ray tracing probably was not worth the $800 I paid at the time. Now the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 promises to be the type of upgrade I was looking for back then.
Time for a Real Upgrade
Not wanting to pay $1200 for a 2080 Ti, I could not wait for the Ampere flavor of cards to release. After seeing the huge performance boost of the 3080 model, I was more than ready to pay the $699 for the bump in performance.
Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Launch Day
If you haven’t heard, every card sold out just about instantly. Bot programs used by scalpers gobbled up most of the stock and ended up on eBay with huge markups. The hype was huge, but somehow Nvidia failed to produce enough cards to even come close to keeping up with demand. Even now it is sold out everywhere, save a few system builders that promise to include in new towers.
Capacitor Problems
For those lucky enough to snag a new card, or paid the huge eBay markup, they were running into crashes that were traced to possible capacitor issues. I sort of hoped that would decrease demand, but a driver update seems to have fixed this for everyone. The search would continue to be hard.
The Nvidia Geforce RTX 3090 Launch
I had hoped they would release a few more 3080s to sellout right before dropping plenty of the $1599 3090s. Unfortunately, those sold out just as fast, and it turns out Nvidia just can’t keep up with demand.
3070 Gets Pushed Back
Back on the 3080 launch day, I also thought maybe they would have a bunch of 3090s and 3080s when they finally made the least expensive 3070 model available. The logic was: sell out of the cheap one and have plenty of the more expensive ones to entice those that missed out. Now that they have pushed out the launch to ensure adequate stock, this year might not look so good for getting the new card.
So Close
Early last week, I found a nice “Add to Cart” button on a best buy listing for a new 3080. I’ve run into a bug where the page would show that button while the page is processing, but then it would update to the “Sold Out” I’m used to.
This time though, it stayed and I clicked right away. Made my way to checkout only to have no way to select where it should go. I got a message showing it could not be picked up at my store and was not available to ship.
After frustrating research, I found out that it went out of stock while I was on the way to checkout. Whether that means it was a bug or someone snagged it before me is any ones guess.
The Hunt Continues
Now that Nvidia has announced they are unlikely to have enough supply for this year, the hunt is going to continue to be very difficult. With so many great games coming out this year, I would really love to get one near the retail price to push them to their limits. The hunt continues and good luck to anyone else trying for theirs.