I just gave up on Nvidia RTX 3080 stock and bought this instead

I just gave upward on Nvidia RTX 3080 stock and bought this instead

(Epitome credit: Nvidia)

Graphics card stock shortages are going to get worse before they get meliorate. Both Nvidia's RTX 30-serial and AMD's new Radeon RX 6000 GPUs are near enough impossible for the average consumer to buy at reasonable prices; trying to find where to purchase the Nvidia RTX 3080, in item, is an exercise in superhuman luck equally much as it is in retail detective piece of work.

This week, both companies addressed the issue, and both companies broke my frail PC gamer heart: production would not be able to meet demand for some other several months at least. Worse, it appears that the few cards that do emerge from the sold-out void — if only for a few seconds before someone buys them all — are going to become even more than expensive.

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You lot can probably guess at this point that I was hoping to upgrade to one of these cards, specifically the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. And faced with some other half-twelvemonth of thwarting, I snapped: at the earliest glimpse of a hint of a whiff of an opportunity to get something into my basket without a 404 error, I spent more than than twice as much on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090.

Deep downwardly I knew this was a questionable move. The RTX 3080 would have already breezed through elevation-quality 1440p (my favored resolution) gaming every bit if the pixels weren't even there. So I was giving up drastically more money for unnecessary power consumption and most comically excessive horsepower.

And yet, I'yard not sorry. From MIA stock to greedy hoarders, playing the "sensible" waiting game for new graphics cards has never looked so senseless.

Supply shortages — with more than to come

Commencement, some specifics on those AMD and Nvidia developments. Nvidia has blamed the wearisome production of RTX 30 models on numerous constraints, including the depression yield of the 8nm Samsung nodes and a shortage of GDDR6 retentivity used for its latest graphics cards. Whatever the crusade, don't look a gear up anytime before long: The Verge reported that supply won't meaningfully increase until late Apr.

AMD's Dr Lisa Su, meanwhile, has said that the Radeon line's ain component shortages will continue their knock-off effect on the cards themselves for the entire first half of 2021.

Obviously, no-1 truly needs a new graphics card right this instant, and my inability to get more than threescore frames per second in Horizon Zero Dawn is not an actual ailment. But when you hear these kinds of timeframes, which are surely best-case scenarios anyway, it would be a cold-blooded PC possessor who wouldn't lose heart.

Is it so bad to spend some extra cash but to end this exhausting bicycle of checking, missing out, checking, missing out? Perchance if there was some hope that any twenty-four hours now, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang would ride over the hill on a mighty green-and-grey stallion, a million RTX 3080s lined upwards behind him. But in that location isn't, and he won't, no matter how much fanart I draw of it.

The mining boom and rising prices

Another reason to take comfort in my loss of $1,499 is that GPU prices are likely headed up anyway. One of the biggest driving forces looks to exist that old nemesis of affordable PC hardware: cryptocurrency mining.

Gaming graphics cards are instrumental in crypto mining, and then when Bitcoin and other such digital money recently boomed, the already-strained supply lines for new GPUs were overwhelmed completely, every bit prospective miners looked to snap up both old and new models to mine as much as possible. In short, nosotros could be seeing a echo of the 2017 graphics card shortage, when a sustained cryptocurrency goldrush — for those mining operations that still do good from GPU power — depleted stocks and sent prices skyrocketing.

Then there'southward the Trump revenue enhancement. This won't bear on me equally I'm in the United kingdom, but the outgoing U.S. President'due south 25% tax on goods imported from Mainland china no longer gives an exemption to graphics cards and motherboards. The good news for stateside friends that this hasn't immediately resulted in on-the-shelf prices shooting upward as well, but it wouldn't be a surprise as manufacturers start feeling the squeeze.

There's an former, increasingly unfunny joke among PC builders that pokes fun at the infamously volatile pricing of new parts: "When's the best time to build a PC? The week later you lot exercise it." Now it's looking like the best time might not be for some other few months.

This might seem similar nitpicking given the sheer expense of the RTX 3090, especially compared to the RTX 3080. But at least I but paid the launch MSRP for information technology, and since it's the Founders Edition it'south as inexpensive equally any RTX 3090 model can possibly be. No revenue enhancement-inflicted inflation, no cost gouging to take advantage of mining interest. Why wait longer just to pay over the odds anyway?

Scalpers and bots running rampant

Of course, nothing raises a GPU'southward price higher than a scalper setting upward his eBay listing. It'due south fair to say that the battle against hoarding, against bot-wielding crooks misusing tech to purchase and resell hardware at laughable prices, is lost: countermeasures like CAPTCHAs have proven ineffective at stopping the scalpers and their bots from automatically ownership upwards fresh stock as it becomes available.

Low supply is still a factor here, of course, and the scrabble to grab a slice of the latest restock no doubt includes innocent, legitimate PC enthusiasts who take kept their eye on the ball. But when you run across a stock alarm tweet or Discord message, click on the store link within seconds — literally seconds — of it actualization and the prize is all the same already gone, it can feel like fighting a futile war against the machines.

Scalpers volition argue that the real value of any particular is just what people are willing to pay for information technology, and if someone out there is willing to drop $i,500 on a $699 bill of fare, so reselling is merely a service: an amoral but non immoral push button from the invisible mitt of the market.

But this ignores, probably wilfully, that the scarcity that drives those high prices is one of their own making. There'd be no need for anyone to pay so far over the MSRP if ordinary consumers merely had access to the products they want, which instead sit stacked in the garages of someone who bought a shopping script. If there's a paw involved anywhere in this, it's perfectly visible and it'due south flipping buyers the bird.

One solution might be to purchase a bot yourself, simply for the unmarried purchase. While this would level the playing field, information technology's all the same money going into the pockets of greyness marketeers who build tools integral to the rip-off tactics of full-time scalpers.

Why, though, has their victory driven me into the arms of the RTX 3090? Simple: it'south the graphics carte scalpers are least interested in. At least, that'southward the conclusion I've drawn from a few weeks of "research" (despondent clicking on stock tweets), which showed that new RTX 3090 stock would at least accept a couple of minutes to sell out again, rather than a couple of seconds.

Buying this graphics menu was not my greatest moment of fortitude. Information technology flies in the face of advice I myself have given others thinking about a new GPU. Merely given the painful expect for a return to normalcy, and the grifters circling similar sharks, I'm convinced it was the but pick I had left.

James is currently Hardware Editor at Rock Paper Shotgun, simply before that was Audio Editor at Tom'due south Guide, where he covered headphones, speakers, soundbars and annihilation else that intentionally makes racket. A PC enthusiast, he too wrote computing and gaming news for TG, usually relating to how hard it is to discover graphics card stock.