Just after Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 went on sale this week, the company's latest flagship card sold out within minutes or less across several major retailers including Nvidia's own online store – and Nvidia has taken notice.
Bots and internet profiteers swooped in like a plague of silicon locusts and stripped the internet dry of any available cards that retailers had in stock, leaving regular buyers in the cold, according to PCMag.
RTX 3080 day.Amazon has no search results.Newegg is down. BestBuy is out of stock before the “Add to Cart” button even ever worked. I’ve had it in my cart 3x and when I checkout it says “out of stock”.You’d think companies would be prepared for this.PS5 too. So dumb...September 17, 2020
"To stop bots and [profiteers] on the Nvidia store, we’re doing everything humanly possible," Nvidia told PCMag, "including manually reviewing orders, to get these cards in the hands of legitimate customers."
"We apologize to our customers for this morning's experience," the company added.
With intense demand for the new RTX 3080 cards putting pressure on retailer stocks, people have been turning to eBay and paying an outrageous premium to buy one of the few RTX 3080 cards they can get their hands on - even paying more for the RTX 3080 than they would pay a week from now to purchase the much more powerful RTX 3090 when it goes on sale on September 24.
Not every single card will be made available for purchase tomorrow. Keep refreshing the page at 6AM PT to see what will be. If your card isn't available, choose another one that is. https://t.co/gHvazE0jJYSeptember 17, 2020
Not all retailers sold their entire stock of cards in the first few moments of it going on sale. Newegg indicated in a statement on Twitter that they would be holding some stock back initially, most likely to dole out a set number of cards throughout the week while they wait to replenish their inventory.
Fortunately, Nvidia and other manufacturers are reportedly pushing new cards out the door to retailers every day - and given the demand for the RTX 3080, they might have a busy couple of weeks ahead of them.
