Despite promises that the RX 6700 XT will have more stock than previous Radeon 6000 series graphics cards, it looks like we're going to experience similar issues when the new GPU releases on March 18.
According to igor'sLAB (opens in new tab), "If you condense the information of various board partners and distributors to a trend, then there are, depending on the manufacturer and model, only a few pieces (for Germany) to a few thousand for the EU as a whole."
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We're also seeing claims from other sources such as Red Gaming Tech (opens in new tab) on YouTube that give slightly different figures, predicting that the UK could receive between one thousand and two thousand units at launch, with future shipments of this quantity being delivered to retailers weekly.
We have no way of officially verifying any of this information, so don't take anything as gospel. If proved to be true, this is better than the previous unit quantity seen shipped for the RX 6000 series cards, but AMD's claims of improving stock availability sounded much better than the actual figure we might see.
A global shortage of GDDR6 memory has previously been referenced as the cause of supply issues faced by AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 and Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series GPUs, though interfering shipments of Covid-19 vaccinations have also been suggested as a contributing factor.
Nvidia GeForce GPUs such as the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 use GDDR6X and so might be less impacted by the shortage, but this doesn't seem to make the graphics cards any easier to buy. Chipmakers have predicted that ongoing supply issues for components could mean we don't see GPU availability stabilize until 2022.
And of course, even if the shortage of hardware is resolved, gamers will still be battling against bots and crypto miners to get their hands on a shiny new GPU. It looks like there isn't a current end in sight for stock issues, which certainly begs the question – why are new GPUs being released if AMD and Nvidia can't meet the demand for its existing products?
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Via VideoCardz (opens in new tab)
